Inflammation gets a worse reputation than it deserves. When you roll an ankle or strain your back, the swelling and heat are your body doing its job. Blood and repair cells flooding the area. That is the useful kind. Short-lived. Productive.
The trouble starts when it does not switch off.
Then it stops being repair and becomes the thing keeping you in pain. Weeks later you are still stiff. Still sore. Still waiting on something that was supposed to settle a month ago.
That is the situation I see most. People who have rested, iced, taken the ibuprofen, and gotten nowhere. Laser therapy is one of the tools I reach for in those cases. Not a magic wand. A way to calm inflamed tissue so the rest of the treatment can actually work. Here is how it fits, and where it does not.
Call 720-889-1659 to schedule an evaluation with Dr. Brockway.
What Inflammation Actually Is, and Why Yours Isn’t Going Away
The textbook version is five signs. Pain, heat, redness, swelling, and loss of function. Physicians have leaned on that list for roughly two thousand years. Still holds up.
Those signs appear because your immune system sends blood and white blood cells rushing to an injured area. Vessels widen. Fluid leaks into the tissue. The spot swells, warms, and gets tender. All normal. That is acute inflammation, and it is supposed to fade as you heal.
Chronic inflammation is a different animal. The trigger never fully clears, or the immune system stays switched on long after the threat is gone. Stuck in alarm mode. The same response that helped you in week one is grinding down healthy tissue by month three.
This is why “just rest it” quits working at some point. Rest helps the acute kind. It does almost nothing for the chronic kind. By then the issue is not that you need more time. The inflammation has dug in and will not lift on its own. When pain hangs around past six or eight weeks, that is usually what is going on.
Where Laser Therapy Fits in Calming Inflammation
Let me be straight about one thing first. The biggest levers on inflammation are not in my office.
Sleep. Movement. What you eat. Cutting back on the processed food and the added sugar. Those shift whole-body inflammation more than any single treatment I can offer. If your entire system is inflamed, that is where the real work lives.
Laser therapy is for the localized kind. The angry joint. The disc that will not quiet down. The tendon that has been irritated for months. It is a targeted tool for a targeted problem, not a reset button for your whole body.
That is the honest framing. In the office, laser is one of several professional options for stubborn musculoskeletal inflammation, sitting alongside hands-on care and rehab. It works best as part of a plan, not as the entire plan.
How Laser Therapy Works, in Plain English
The technical name is photobiomodulation. A mouthful. It used to be called low-level laser therapy, and you will still hear people say “cold laser.”
The idea is simpler than the name. Specific wavelengths of light get absorbed by your cells, mostly by the mitochondria, the little engines inside each cell that make energy. Feed them light at the right wavelength and they produce more of that energy. More cellular energy means better local circulation, and better circulation helps the tissue flush out the byproducts of inflammation. Swelling comes down. The area shifts from inflamed toward healing.
No heat you would notice at the lower settings. No cutting. Nothing breaks the skin. The light does the work at the cellular level.
That is the mechanism. Worth saying it is better understood in a lab dish than in a living person, which is part of why the evidence is mixed. More on that below.
Cold Laser vs. Class IV, and What We Use
People ask about this all the time, usually after reading something online. Here is the short version.
Therapy lasers get sorted by power. Class III lasers, often called cold or low-level, run under half a watt. Gentle. Good for surface and nerve-related work, but limited in how deep they reach. Class IV lasers run far higher. They penetrate deeper into tissue, which matters when the inflamed structure is a joint or a disc sitting well below the skin.
At Glendale Chiropractic we run a Coherent Medical therapy laser that tops out at 45 watts. That puts it firmly in Class IV territory. But the power is variable. I can dial it down to low-level settings for surface or nerve work, or bring it up for deep musculoskeletal inflammation. Most clinics own one type or the other. This unit does both, and I match the setting to your tissue and your problem.
It runs at 850 nanometers, which is near-infrared light. Invisible to the eye, despite what the word “laser” leads people to expect. That wavelength is chosen because near-infrared reaches deeper than visible red light. One detail I like: the unit is engineered and built right here in Colorado.
What Laser Therapy Helps With Here
Laser is suited to musculoskeletal pain and localized inflammation. That is its lane. Inside that lane, the conditions I use it for most:
- Low back pain, especially when there is persistent inflammation around the disc and nerve roots driving it.
- Sciatica, where there is inflammation around an irritated sciatic nerve root sending pain down the leg.
- Arthritic joints, where chronic inflammation inside the joint is the pain generator.
- Tendon trouble. Rotator cuff, tennis elbow, that whole category.
- Nerve issues, including the nerve irritation and neuropathy symptoms where calming the surrounding inflammation takes some of the edge off.
What it is not: a cure for any of these on its own. I use it to bring inflammation down so adjustments, Traction Therapy on our Invertrac, and rehab exercises can do their part. The laser opens the door. The rest of the plan walks through it.
Does It Actually Work? An Honest Look
This is the section most laser pages skip. I will not.
The evidence for laser therapy is mixed. For several musculoskeletal uses, like neck pain, some forms of arthritis, and certain tendon injuries, studies show a real but modest benefit. Pain drops. Function improves somewhat. For other uses the evidence is thinner, and some studies land close to placebo.
Results vary a lot from person to person, too. The same protocol that clearly helps one patient does little for the next. Nobody can fully predict who responds.
So I treat it as what it is. A low-risk, drug-free option that can help with localized inflammation, works best layered with other care, and is not a silver bullet. If you want to read what the research actually says about light-based therapy, it is worth your time, because honest sources land where I do. Promising for some things. Oversold for others. Worth trying for the right problem, with realistic expectations.
If a clinic promises a cure in three sessions, be skeptical. I would rather under-promise and let the results do the talking.
How Many Sessions, and How Long Until You Feel It?
It is cumulative. That is the main thing to understand. One session rarely does much. The effect builds over a series.
Some people feel a little relief early, in the first few visits. Most need a run of sessions before the change is clear. A rough guide:
- Acute problems, recent and inflamed, often respond within a handful of sessions.
- Chronic problems, the months-or-years kind, take a longer course, and the real progress tends to show up a few weeks in.
Sessions are short. A few minutes up to around fifteen, depending on the area and how many spots we treat. Early on we would usually see you a few times a week, then taper as things settle.
If you are several sessions in and nothing is moving, I will tell you, and we will change the approach rather than keep going out of habit.
What a Session Feels Like
Anticlimactic, mostly. In a good way.
You can wear protective eyewear if you like. The laser either rests against the skin or hovers just above it, and I move it across the treatment area. At higher settings you may feel a mild warmth. At lower settings, often nothing at all. No pinching, no pain, no recovery time.
When it is done, you get up and carry on with your day. No downtime. Most people head straight back to work.
Is It Safe? Who Should Not Get Laser Therapy
For most people, laser therapy is very safe. Non-invasive, drug-free, with few side effects. When they do happen they tend to be minor and brief, like mild soreness or a little redness at the treated spot.
That said, it is not for everyone, and there are real situations where I will not use it.
| WHO SHOULD NOT GET LASER THERAPY I screen for these before treating, and I will tell you directly if laser is not appropriate for you: Over any known or suspected cancerous tissue Over the abdomen or lower back during pregnancy Directly over the thyroid Into or near the eyes, which is why protective eyewear is recommended for everyone With caution if you take medications that increase light sensitivity Over certain implanted electronic devices If any of these apply to you, say so up front. When laser is not the right fit, there is almost always another approach that is. |
Cost and Insurance, a Straight Answer
Worth setting expectations here, because it catches people off guard.
Most commercial insurance plans and Medicare classify laser therapy for musculoskeletal pain as experimental and do not cover it as a standalone service. Auto-injury and workers’ compensation claims are sometimes more flexible, especially when treatment is documented as part of an injury recovery.
We will be straight with you about what your plan does and does not cover, and we will lay out the cost clearly before you commit to anything. No surprises on the bill. If you want a quote for your specific situation, just ask when you call.
How We Use Laser Therapy at Glendale Chiropractic
Laser is rarely the first thing I do, and never the only thing.
Your first visit is an evaluation. About thirty minutes. I go through your history, watch how you move, and work out what is actually driving the pain. I usually do not adjust anyone on visit one until I have reviewed imaging, and we refer out for that rather than doing it in-house. If you are hurting badly that day, I may do some soft tissue work to take the edge off.
Once I understand the problem, laser becomes one piece of a plan that usually also includes adjustments, Traction Therapy on our Invertrac for disc-related cases, and specific exercises to hold the gains. The goal is lasting relief, not a brief quiet spell before the next flare.
More than fifteen years doing this in Denver. Dr. John Brockway. If chronic inflammation has you stuck, come in and let’s find out what is feeding it.
Call 720-889-1659 to book your evaluation, or request an appointment online at myglendalechiro.com.
Glendale Chiropractic
Phone: 720-889-1659
Address: 425 S. Cherry St., Ste. 307, Glendale, CO 80246
Hours: Mon–Thu 9:00 AM–12:30 PM and 2:30–6:00 PM. Closed Friday through Sunday.
Location: Right off I-25 and Colorado Blvd. Easy to reach from Cherry Creek, Capitol Hill, Park Hill, Highlands, Lakewood, Aurora, and downtown Denver.
Insurance: Most major Colorado plans accepted. We verify your benefits before your first visit.
Reviews: 145 Google reviews at 5.00 stars.