It's easy to laugh and make fun of the medbed people...
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It's easy to laugh and make fun of the medbed people... but then I remember my TENS machine and why I have a TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) machine.
When you are sick, when you have chronic pain you'll try things just to see if maybe it might work.
Do TENS machines work?
No. Kinda? Yes? Sometimes?
Basically, it's a machine that runs a current through your skin making your muscles twitch a little.
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It's easy to laugh and make fun of the medbed people... but then I remember my TENS machine and why I have a TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) machine.
When you are sick, when you have chronic pain you'll try things just to see if maybe it might work.
Do TENS machines work?
No. Kinda? Yes? Sometimes?
Basically, it's a machine that runs a current through your skin making your muscles twitch a little.
They are inexpensive and when I asked my doctor about it she said "you can try it if you want, some people say it helps, I wouldn't bother, but I won't tell you it's harmful"
I will say that the TENS machine produces a very strange slightly annoying sensation that distracted me from the pain. So, in that sense it "worked."
Of course I wanted it to REALLY work, have a dramatic effect. That did not happen. My doctor told me it wouldn't.
I messed with the damn thing anyway.
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They are inexpensive and when I asked my doctor about it she said "you can try it if you want, some people say it helps, I wouldn't bother, but I won't tell you it's harmful"
I will say that the TENS machine produces a very strange slightly annoying sensation that distracted me from the pain. So, in that sense it "worked."
Of course I wanted it to REALLY work, have a dramatic effect. That did not happen. My doctor told me it wouldn't.
I messed with the damn thing anyway.
Medical doctor and former physical therapy patient here. I never really stopped to think how effective TENS was! I sort of implicitly trusted it in the hands of physiotherapists and distrusted it in home devices. The only time I found a study on TENS, it was a direct-to-costumer device for headache (migraine?), but the trial was not prospectively registered and the methods were a little off, so I just forgot about it.
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Medical doctor and former physical therapy patient here. I never really stopped to think how effective TENS was! I sort of implicitly trusted it in the hands of physiotherapists and distrusted it in home devices. The only time I found a study on TENS, it was a direct-to-costumer device for headache (migraine?), but the trial was not prospectively registered and the methods were a little off, so I just forgot about it.
I'm not saying it's bad. I was curious and read everything I could find about it and the results are deeply mixed.
What it isn't is a solution. It's something that might help. For some people more than others.
And it's not incidental or meaningless that it helped me to get through the long healing period by being something I could "do" ... the real cure being slow boring PT and time.
