<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />Another case of you get what you pay for.<br /><br />https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMra2110098<br /><br />#pain #scrambler #TENS <br />
