Sustained Acoustic Medicine

Sustained Acoustic Medicine or SAM is a long-duration therapeutic ultrasound medical procedure to musculoskeletal tissues for increasing local circulation and accelerating the healing of injured tissues. Generally speaking, SAM treatment regimens start with 1 hour and go up to 4 hours of daily therapeutic ultrasound treatment of injured or painful tissues such as tendinopathies, muscle spasms, joint contractures and arthritis, and other general soft-tissue inflammation injuries and musculoskeletal pain. Therapeutic ultrasound as a physiotherapy rehabilitation tool has been applied for over 80 years for 10 to 20 minutes in the clinic setting. SAM on the other hand provides both longer and daily ultrasound treatments to sustain the biological enhancement to injured tissues such as increased local circulation, greater nutrient transfer, upregulation of collagen synthesis, and reduction of inflammation and inflammatory cytokines. The development of SAM began out of Cornell University from research supported by The National Science Foundation on developing long-duration ultrasound treatment systems. The study of SAM was also supported by The National Institutes of Health for the treatment of Osteoarthritis of the knee and The National Space and Biomedical Research Institute funded by NASA for the treatment of back pain caused by herniated disks. Sustained Acoustic Medicine, SAM is classified as a drug-free bioelectronic approach to assist with chronic pain management and soft tissue healing.