Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. Written by : golden. User assumes all risk of use, damage, or injury. You agree that we have no liability for any damages. Summary: 1. Author Recent Posts. Latest posts by golden see all. Help us improve. Rate this post! Cancel Reply. Follow Us. In the clinical context, it is most commonly assumed to refer to the use of electrical stimulation with the specific intention of providing symptomatic pain relief.
Both are palliative treatments that utilize electric currents for long-term intractable pain and post-operative and post-traumatic periods of acute pain. The two procedures were proven harmless and effective substitutes to pharmacologic treatments to control pain. Equally, they have a minimal side effect to patients and are non-addictive.
They can cause some adverse effects by the irritations of the skin where the electrodes are placed. They are both convenient to use and easy to carry. IFT uses a two-polar frequency circuit and four-polar frequency circuit of slightly dissimilar cycles per second that are placed on the site that will give you the resultant frequency that is conceded by the specific frequency amplitude.
Then an interference is formed that can block the pain transmission messages at the level of the spinal cord. The stimulation of the inferential electricity can concentrate at the intersection point of the electrodes through the location of the deep tissues. TENS electric reactions in the sensory and motor nerve fibers are caused by the low-voltage current. It uses the gate control theory. The difference lies below:. TENS , Transcutaneous Electrical Neural Stimulation: This type of stimulation is characterized by biphasic current and selectable parameters such as pulse rate and pulse width.
TENS stimulates sensory nerves to block pain signals, stimulate endorphin production to help normalize sympathetic function. TENS is generally used to treat medical conditions. Common uses: Acute and chronic pain, back and cervical muscular and disc syndromes, RSD, arthritis, shoulder syndromes, neuropathies, and many other painful conditions.
We found through this review that even though TENS and IFT are used in management of pain, there is limited amount of high quality research available in this area. Most of the studies lack methodological quality and have a low sample size. Evidence-based practice is essential in clinical practice to hasten the recovery of a patient. In electrotherapy the applied energy is the trigger that stimulates or activates physiological events, which achieve therapeutic benefits that bring about pain relief.
The analgesic effects of TENS is seen in both the ipsilateral and contralateral spinal segmental regions. Thus, the benefits of LF stimulation are achieved without the associated unpleasant side effects like pain, discomfort, skin irritation, etc.
The history of using electric currents to treat pain goes back to BC where some stone carvings depict a species of catfish with organs that produce an electrical charge used to treat pain. The physician to the Roman Emperor Claudius in AD46 claimed that standing on an electric fish could relieve symptoms of pain. Melzack and Wall in published the gate-control theory with which increased the use of electroanalgesia. They proposed that a physiological gating mechanism exists in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord.
By selectively exciting A-beta nerve fibers in the skin with TENS, the amount of painful stimulation being transmitted by smaller diameter nerve fibers can be reduced, through segmental inhibition.
Conventional TENS also acts by reducing the release of excitatory neurotransmitters such as aspartate and glutamate, increasing the release of inhibitory neurotransmitters such as gamma-aminobutyric acid GABA and serotonin. It acts by stimulating the A-delta nerve fibers to produce endorphins which in turn relieve pain.
Different programs can be used interchangeably according to the preference of the patient. Kocygit et al. Both the groups were given painful stimuli before and after TENS treatment. They found on functional magnetic resonance imaging MRI that in the LF TENS group, there was a statistically significant decrease in the perceived pain intensity and pain-specific activation of the contralateral primary sensory cortex, bilateral caudal anterior cingulate cortex, and of the ipsilateral supplementary motor area.
They also reported in their results a statistically significant correlation between the change of Visual Analog Scale VAS value and the change of activity in the contralateral thalamus, prefrontal cortex, and the ipsilateral posterior parietal cortex. Although the sample size is low, MRI is a reliable tool in measuring the pain perceived by the individual.
They used the Hargreaves method to measure nociception while the hydroplethysmometer was used to measure edema. Hargreaves method measures cutaneous hyperalgesia to thermal stimulation in animals.
This study supports the participation of peripheral endogenous opioid receptors in LF TENS analgesia in addition to its central action. Since the analgesia produced by the application of LF TENS is due to the release of endogenous opioids it lasts for a longer time.
The post-treatment analgesic effects of TENS can thus last anywhere between 5 minutes to 18 hours. Post-stimulation analgesia has been widely attributed to the accumulation or depletion of endogenous opioids. There is a wide variation in post treatment pain relief experienced by patients and no reason for this has been documented yet.
Cheing et al. Low frequency currents. Very few systematic reviews have examined the use of TENS for postoperative pain management.
0コメント