Service Detail
Electrotherapy — Our Honest Position
TENS, therapeutic ultrasound, interferential — old-school electrotherapy modalities were a fixture of physiotherapy for decades. The current evidence base is thin for most of them, which is why we use them sparingly and only where there's a real clinical reason. Here's the honest position.
What the evidence actually says
Therapeutic ultrasound has been heavily downgraded in current MSK guidelines — outcomes rarely outperform sham. TENS has a role for short-term pain modulation, particularly chronic pain. Interferential is comparable. We don't pretend these are major treatments.
What we use instead
Manual therapy, exercise prescription, shockwave therapy for tendinopathies, and graded loading. These are the interventions where the evidence is genuinely strong and where we see consistent results across our caseload.
When we still use electrotherapy
Specific chronic pain presentations where TENS is helpful as a self-managed adjunct, and very occasional cases where ultrasound serves a specific purpose. We're transparent about expectations — these aren't headline interventions.
- No padding sessions with electrotherapy to fill the hour
- Honest evidence-based recommendations
- Refer onward where another modality is more appropriate
Other services and areas we cover
Areas we cover