SUPER MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY COMES TO LONG ISLAND North Shore Towers Courier n February 2014 9 Ever notice how big medical breakthroughs seem to make it into television, magazines, radio, and Internet news, but somehow never nd their way into your local doctor’s of ce? Well now one has. And it’s dramatically changing people’s lives on Long Island. “It’s an amazing technology,” says Richard Blau, M.D., medical director at the Arthritis Institute of Long Island in Hicksville, “and in my eld, it’s revolutionizing diagnosis and therapy in a way I can only compare to the invention of the stethoscope.” Blau’s eld is rheumatology, the treatment of diseases and injuries of the joints, which means everything from a simple carpal tunnel syndrome to the most devastating forms of arthritis. “We’re now seeing great results in 80% of our patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. Those kinds of results were unheard of a couple of years ago.” The technology is called musculoskeletal ultrasound or MSKUS, and while the concept has been around for a while, it has recently become so advanced that it is fundamentally altering the way Dr. Blau practices medicine at the Institute. Here’s why: • It’s incredibly accurate • It radically improves results • It’s painless • It’s portable • It’s fi ve times cheaper than comparable imaging technologies like MRI What MSKUS does is simple: with the touch of a transducer—a handheld wand—to the skin, it painlessly renders a photo of the joint beneath that is so detailed it shows not only damaged tissue but actually reveals the destructive in ammatory process itself. You can’t do that with an x-ray. For an MRI, you’d have to make a separate appointment with a radiologist and lie inside a claustrophobic tube for half an hour to get the same information. If you walk into Dr. Blau’s of ce with a sore shoulder, on the other hand, he can tell you within a few minutes if you have a muscle strain, bursitis, a separation, or a torn rotator cuff before you leave. He also uses the imaging technology to guide injectable drugs with an accuracy never before achieved. That’s important for medications like Hyalgan, which some doctors call the "WD-40" for the joints, because to be effective, you have to inject it into a space deep in the joint that’s only 1 to 2 mm wide—barely bigger than a pinhead. “Studies have shown that even the most highly skilled doctors accurately get this kind of medicine to exactly the right spot only three out of four times when they rely solely on their own judgment and guesswork,” Blau says. “With MSKUS, we can be accurate almost 100% of the time.” MSKUS has also become an indispensable tool in tracking the course of therapy, making it critical in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, a disease which actually destroys joint tissue, causes excruciating pain, and dis gures hands and feet. It not only allows doctors to watch the disease progression, but also shows how well speci c medications are working so that each patient’s therapy is individualized and optimized. Since rst bringing MSKUS to the Institute in December 2012, Blau has seen more than 500 of his patients achieve satisfying results with it. “This is cutting edge science—really the kind of thing you’d see in Star Trek—but it’s real, and it’s available right now at the Institute.” Dr. Richard Blau is a board-certi ed Rheumatologist. He is the medical director and founder of the Arthritis Institute of Long Island and author of the bestseller arthritis selfhelp book - Too Young to Feel Old. His of ce is located at 120 Bethpage Road, Hicksville. 516-932-7777
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