TENS therapy; Healing benefits or just pain relief?

Factual Questions
1

I was actually going to start a thread on the efficacy of chiropractic treatment, but someone recently beat me to it. Anyway, having read a great deal of the literature on that subject from threads here and their links, I tend to believe that my chiro is in the small percentage of the good ones.

But when I asked him about TENS therapy I received what I perceive to be a somewhat sketchy answer. Every one of our sessions ends with TENS on my lower back and neck. He also gave me my own TENS machine for home use.

I had read about the pain relieving benefits of TENS, and indeed experienced them first hand. But I asked him if there is any curative value to it and he replied that the one I have for home use is really only for pain relief while the ones they have there penetrate deeper and do aid in the actual healing process.

I don’t really buy it, but is there a basis for his claim?

2

IME, TENS are good only for pain relief. And many won’t find it effective even for this. Some individuals will get enough relief from their TENS units to increase their activities, live a more normal life, and gain great benefit from that, in terms of overall “healing”. But in the sense of speeding tissue healing, I have seen no good evidence that TENS does that on a reliable basis.

QtM, MD

3

IANAD, but I’ve used a portable TENS unit for back pain. I have seen no litarature that shows any healing effect of the TENS unit, but if by using it you can reduce reliance on oral painkillers then that is deffinately a good thing.
Good luck with your pain management.
Cheers, Keithy

PS as an asside, I had for a long time upper quadrent back pain, with intermittent bouts of extreme agony maybe once a month lasting 30 to 300 minutes. The docs were unable to find the cause and I was on pain relief for about 5 years. Turns out though that I had gall stones, triggered by rapid weight loss due to hospitalization for burst Appendix. They were only diagnosed when they caused Pancreatitis ! Now with Gall bladder removed I don’t get back pains much any more

So Doctors, when a patient has upper quadrent backpains, especially if they tell you they get Accute attacks often 30 mins after a large meal, Please consider Gall Stones as a possible cause. It would have saved me a hell of a lot of disscomfort.