Several studies attest to the effectiveness of electrotherapy in treating drug-resistant pain. Update on progress in this area.
Few things are as trying as persistent pain. If this is your case, know that one area is making significant progress in this area: electrotherapy. It is used to treat patients on whom analgesics have little or no effect, suffering from pain called “neuropathic pain”, linked to a dysfunction of the pain system. In this case, the pathways of transmission of painful messages are damaged, which usually occurred during trauma.
Concretely, electrotherapy “modifies the activity of nerves which are related to pain” via more or less invasive techniques, explains in Le Figaro Prof. Serge Perrot, rheumatologist and head of the pain center at Cochin hospital in Paris. In other words, thanks to electricity, the pain message is bypassed so as not to reach the brain.
Therapeutic dead end
Thus, a new technique of electrical stimulation has enabled 50% of 140 patients recruited in nine French centers to considerably reduce their pain, due to strokes, lesions of the facial nerve, the peripheral nerve and damage to the spinal cord. “This is a modest result, but far from being negligible, because these patients were in terrible pain and could not get rid of this pain. These patients were at a real therapeutic impasse”, indicate Researchers.
More recently, a study published in the JAMA Surgery indicates that electrotherapy makes it possible to reduce the consumption of painkillers following total knee arthroplasty (knee replacement, Editor’s note). This is a very good thing, because, as the authors recall, “in the long term, poor management of postoperative pain leads to a transition to chronic pain and prolonged use of narcotics, which can lead to opioid dependence” .
Stimulation of peripheral nerves
Migraine sufferers who are resistant to painkillers also have opportunities to seize. Of 36 patients treated with peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS), 28 had relief, according to a study published by the American society of anesthesiologists. “Peripheral nerve stimulation is a safe and effective modality in the management of debilitating headaches refractory to treatment”, congratulate the authors. “Although the intervention is minimally invasive, the rate of complications is relatively high” , they warn nonetheless.
On the other hand, with regard to transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, which simply consists of applying electrodes to painful points on the skin, no study has so far clearly demonstrated its effectiveness. The branded device Livia, which thus proposes to “relieve the pain associated with menstrual periods”, is not necessarily a panacea.
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