Author’s reply

Sports medicine encompasses sports science, performance medicine, physiotherapy, podiatry, and sports surgery. I searched for the best systematic evidence, which encompassed 11 references, six of them Cochrane Reviews.

Massage and ultrasound may give some symptomatic pain relief, but this is not the same as effecting healing. Bartley offers some evidence that ultrasound works in vitro,1 but does a plausible physiological and biochemical explanation exist …