Conditions ยท Shingles Pain
Shingles is a virus that travels along a nerve, and the pain can linger long after the rash is gone. Here's what's happening and how super pulsed cold laser can help calm it.
Book a SessionShingles often starts with burning, tingling, or stabbing pain on one side of the body, then a band of blisters a few days later. For some people the pain fades when the rash heals. For others it hangs on for weeks or months. Even the brush of a shirt can hurt.
The shingles virus is the same one that causes chickenpox. After chickenpox, it hides in a nerve near your spine for years. When it wakes up, it travels down that nerve to the skin. That's why the rash follows a stripe on one side of your body.
The trip irritates the nerve. Sometimes the nerve stays irritated after the skin heals. It keeps firing pain signals and becomes so sensitive that ordinary touch registers as pain. That's a nervous system with the volume turned all the way up.
Super pulsed cold laser can help reduce shingles pain by inhibiting nociceptive neurons. Those are the nerve cells that carry pain signals. We treat them along the whole path the virus traveled: at the nerve roots near your spine, along the main nerve trunk, and out through the branches that reach your skin.
For shingles, the approach is different from most of our work.
Most laser treatment uses gentle pressure on the skin. Shingles skin often can't tolerate any touch, so the laser is held just above the skin and moved slowly along the nerve path instead.
The goal is to quiet an overactive nerve, not wake anything up. Your protocol is matched to your healing phase and how sensitive the area is.
We work the root near your spine, the trunk, and the branches under the painful stripe, so the whole nerve gets the calming signal.
We've seen this in our own office. Two patients came to Holistic Body Shop with shingles pain, and both had their pain significantly reduced with laser treatment. That's what happened for those two patients. Every nervous system responds differently, and shingles isn't one of the conditions the laser is FDA-cleared for, so we'll be straight with you about what to expect.
We'll ask when the rash started, where the pain is, and what your doctor has prescribed. Treatment works alongside your medical care, not in place of it. Sessions are gentle, and you can tell us to stop at any point.
If the rash has healed but the nerve pain hasn't, call us to talk through whether laser makes sense for you.
Book a $75 Session See Membership & Packages Ask the Organic MechanicIf you think you have shingles, call your doctor right away. Antiviral medicine works best when it's started early, within the first few days of the rash. Shingles near your eye or on your face needs urgent medical attention.
While the blisters are open, the virus can spread to people who have never had chickenpox or the vaccine. Please let us know before your visit if you have an active rash, so we can plan around it.