Hilotherapy is a continuous-flow therapy that may be used as thermotherapy for warming or as cryotherapy for cooling. A device (Hilotherm) provides exactly the selected temperature between 10 °C and 38 °C. This temperature is applied to the patient by face masks or body cuffs.
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Most common application
Hilotherapy is a form of cryotherapy, which is a widely used method to treat patients after surgeries or injuries. It is applied to stop bleeding (through vasoconstriction) and avoid swelling, hematoma, and pain. However, there are also negative effects of cryotherapy when treatment temperatures are too low. Those are: frostbite [7], reactive hyperaemia (increased bleeding) [8, 9, 10], increased swelling (with 5 °C to 15 °C tissue temperature) [11, 12, 13], and nerve palsy [7, 14, 15, 16].
Benefits of Hilotherapy
Unlike most cooling methods, hilotherapy offers the possibility of controlling the exact temperature setting for the treatment. Therefore, it is safer but, as a continuous-flow cold therapy, also more effective than non-continuous-flow systems (ice, compresses, bucket systems etc.) in terms of pain/analgesics reduction [, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23], reduced swelling [, 22], and greater early range of motion [, 17, 18, 20, 23].