Scrambling Your Pain Reduces It

Scrambler therapy is a technique for eliminating chronic pain by applying electrical stimulation to the skin around the site of that pain. The news is that it yields significant pain relief for 80-90% of patients who receive it. From Johns Hopkins comes a New England Journal of Medicine review of both this scrambler technique and the more traditional TENS electrostimulation technique.

The scrambler approach stimulates the skin above and below the painful zone while TENS, trans-cutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, applies electrical impulses at the painful site. The scrambler half-hour stimulation sessions, repeated from 3 to 12 times, stimulate nerves serving non-painful zones with normal tissues and in doing so scramble and block the pain signals coming from the adjacent painful zone with sometimes damaged nerves and tissues.

Scrambler therapy tends not only to be more effective at eliminating pain than TENS, but the pain elimination is also longer lasting. The downsides: scrambler therapy cannot be given to those with implanted cardiac pacemakers, defibrillators, or other nerve stimulators.; only one manufacturer makes the device; it costs $65,000; and it can only be used with direct physician supervision. In contrast, you can purchase on Amazon a TENS unit for about $30.

Another case of you get what you pay for.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMra2110098

#pain #scrambler #TENS