Here at New Mexico Foot & Ankle Institute we continuously deal with painful conditions.  We see arthritis, tendonitis, nerve pain, sprained ankles, broken bones and lots and lots of deformities that limit activity levels for various reasons, but the #1 reason is foot or ankle pain.  With the 100’s of different problems we see there are still only a limited number of solutions.

Personally, I struggle occasionally with a pinched nerve in my left foot.  Despite my good orthotics and great collection of good shoes sometimes it still bothers me.  It came down to getting a steroid injection or using the MLS Laser on it.  I chose the MLS laser and it worked great for me.  So why chose the MLS laser over a steroid injection?  For me, the answer was as simple as the shot hurts and the laser doesn’t.

How Does the Laser Work?

Low level lasers have been around for many years and studied extensively and shown to be effective in increasing blood flow to an injured area which in turned helped the healing.  Our MLS laser is short for a class IV multiwave locked system laser.  Additonally, the new MLS laser that we are now using is a high energy laser and overcomes the limitations that the older lasers had of not being able to treat conditions that were deeper down from the skin.  High energy lasers like the MLS laser have been shown to have analgesic, anti-inflammatory, and anti-edema effects.  There is a lot of science behind how this works which is well beyond the scope of this discussion today.

Laser Therapy Treats Foot & Ankle Conditions

The take home message is that the laser can be used to treat almost all of the painful conditions I see in clinic.  Similarly, it opens another door for us to offer more treatment options to patients who are looking for immediate relief of their pain and for safe and pain free ways to achieve that goal.  The laser worked well for my inflamed nerve and we’ve seen tremendous results with the laser on postoperative patients, slow healing wounds, tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, sprained ankles and many other conditions.  In brief, we are always striving to enhance our services to our patients by offering the best available treatments on the market and this is just another way we do this.

Nathan Ivey
Experienced Albuquerque podiatrist specializing in preventing and treating foot and ankle pain.