Abstract
Effective and consistent pain attenuation in acute and chronic pain patients remains a major goal for clinicians in the small hospital environment. In our own experience, we have found that phototherapy, at first with a helium-neon (HeNe) laser and subsequently (and currently) with a broad band polarized polychromatic visible red ∼ near infrared light source has had good efficacy, both in acute pain types in addition to chronic pain patients: the latter, however, require more treatments. We report on two studies, one using general phototherapy for acute and chronic pain, and a smaller trial using irradiation of the area around the stellate ganglion as an alternative to conventional stellate ganglion anesthetic blockade. In the first and second trials, the immediate efficacy rates for acute pain patients were 87.5% and 100%, respectively. For chronic pain the immediate efficacy after the first treatment was 69% and 57.1%, and after the last treatment 82% and 89.5%, respectively. Phototherapy would therefore appear to have an interesting role to play in the treatment even of chronic pain. In addition to pain, phototherapy can be applied in a number of other areas, and some of these are listed. Phototherapy over the stellate ganglion is compared with conventional stellate ganglion anaesthetic block. Our studies were, however, only preliminary studies, and are limited by small patient populations and the lack of stratification of efficacy by pain aetiology. Larger studies are planned for the future, as we feel that phototherapy is an effective, safe and patient-friendly therapeutic modality, easily applied and well-tolerated by patients of all ages.
