Thermal Ultrasound Case Study

An athlete of the women’s soccer team came into the athletic training room the day after weekend road trip complaining about pain in her leg. She said she started feelings this pain during warm up of one of the games they played during the weekend and that it slowly got better as the game went on. Although she did say that the pain returns after she cooled down after the game and was still present the next day. She said it felt very similar to “shin splints” which she had had once before. After doing an evaluation and finding out that there was no fractures, sprains, or strains, it was decided that this athlete had the prognosis of medial tibial stress syndrome. Medial tibial stress syndrome is a very common overuse injury in which there …show more content…
Thermal ultrasound was used on this athlete. The idea behind using thermal ultrasound is to increase blood flow, increase collagen elasticity, decrease stiffness, modulation pain, and increase blood flow. The use of ultrasound was paired with light therapy because the certified has had two of his other women’s soccer player have positive results when pairing these two things. The goal of light therapy is to send waves of certain frequencies into the healing area to help speed up the healing process. Paired with these modalities there was also strengthening exercises that they had the athlete due. All of the strengthen exercises deal with building up the intrinsic and extrinsic leg muscles to help make the periosteum have to work less, which should result in a decrease in symptoms. The exercised that they had the athlete due include marble pickups, towel pulls, calf raises, heel, and toes walks. These combined with doing stretching through. The main focus is one stretching the calf muscles to help increase the range of motion of dorsiflexion in the ankle. So far the athlete still have medial tibial stress syndrome, but it is slowly getting