Revisão bibliográfica sobre a aplicação da fonoforese como método de intervenção fisioterapêutica no contexto desportivo

Abstract

In their clinical practice, sport physiotherapists rely on a range of electrotherapeutic resources for the care of athletes, such as: cryotherapy, laser, ultrasound, iontophoresis and also phonophoresis. In phonophoresis, ultrasound is used to deliver drugs into the tissues, with analgesics, steroid anti-inflammatories and nonsteroids being the drugs most commonly used in the art. The use of this tool as a therapeutic agent can be of great value in the sports clinic if the sports physiotherapist has a good understanding of its use, in order to confer better quality and comfort to the athletes during the treatment, as well as fewer side effects. The present study aims to investigate the pathologies that have been commonly addressed with the use of phonophoresis, as well as the possible applications for the sports field. Searches were conducted in the following search engines: PubMed, MEDLINE, SciELO, PEDro and Portal of Periodicals of CAPES, using the following terms: phonophoresis, sports, athletes and musculoskeletal injuries for the Portuguese language and Phonophoresis, Sports, and musculoskeletal injuries for the English language. We included studies that related in general to the use of phonophoresis in the sporting context or to the use of phonophoresis in pathologies typical of sports. We excluded studies that were not in full, as well as those that did not present an outcome regarding the use of phonophoresis. Of the 14 studies included in this study, 9 involved clinical trials, 3 reviews of the literature and 2 preclinical trials aimed at the development of drugs for potential use in sports clinics. Although the vast majority of the findings of the present study reported good results regarding the use of phonophoresis as an intervention method, few studies were found to verify the use of phonophoresis exclusively in the sports context. There was also difficulty in standardizing the modulations for the use of phonophoresis and for the varied concentrations of the drugs used. Therefore, more research is needed exclusively within the sporting sphere, controlling better the aforementioned variables, in order to better elucidate the employability of this technique in sport.