Ultrasounds: effective or not?

Today my gp recommended that I get an ultrasound on my shoulders/neck/upper back area. I went to book it and they said it's €150 and would take 15 minutes.

In the meantime I've googled shoulder spasm ultrasound and the first result was:

Does Ultrasound Therapy Work? where the writer says:

...Almost everyone seems to assume that ultrasound is proven — good technological medicine — but that just doesn’t seem to be the case.

Unfortunately — although there are some interesting exceptions and tantalizing hopes for some conditions — ultrasound is not a promising therapy for most of the painful problems it is used for. There is a jarring, bizarre lack of quality research for such a popular, mainstream therapy. What little research is available paints a bland picture. Ultrasound therapy isn’t even on good theoretical foundations. At best, it’s more complicated and unpredictable than most therapists believe. At worst, there is no rational basis for US at all.

Although ultrasound is almost certainly useful for some patients, some of the time, it is not a reliable or evidence-based therapy, and enjoys far more credibility than it deserves.... Ultrasound is pseudo-quackery
The disconnect between the popularity of US and the more or less total lack of informative research is troubling. A handful of good studies is a joke for a therapy that is worth literally billions of dollars in the marketplace. How can that much therapy be sold without a satisfactory body of evidence that it works? Bizarre! This is the ultimate example of pseudo-quackery: popular treatments that aren’t overt quackery (they are plausible, not obviously at odds with established science) but fall well short of validated, scientific medicine and are sold with excessive confidence and usually considered mainstream.

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Is this the same ultrasound that would be done in Ireland to sort out shoulder/neck spasms, or is the one for €150 for 15 minutes in Ireland scientifically proven to be effective? Thanks.

banie01

The ultrasound your GP is sending you for is very likely a diagnostic imaging ultrasound.

The ultrasound you seem to be querying is a treatment and not a diagnostic tool.