Editorial: Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) for chronic pain: the opportunity to begin again : Travers, Eccleston et al Apr 2020

• Mervyn J Travers
• Neil E O'Connell
• Peter Tugwell
• Christopher Eccleston
• William Gibson

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.ED000139/full

 

Why's Doctor Who doing this?

 

This. So much this. GIGO syndrome.

Although, Cochrane, you know:



Although, the metaphor is to not throw the stones from your glasshouse because you're just as likely to destroy it than your enemy's but in this case I say go nuts, throw all the damn rocks, indiscriminately and as hard as you can.

 

Only just skimmed this, but very heartening insofar as the overview does what it should - identify cr*p Cochrane reviews as it finds them, and calls for much better in the future.

Disheartening that the reviews were so dire, but that's no surprise to most of us here anyway.

ETA: See correction to my comment by @Jonathan Edwards below.

 

Doesn't it say that the Cochrane reviews were fine but the trials they reviewed were not?

My question would be why begin again with a treatment that has not accrued any worthwhile evidence over forty years?

 

Yes you're absolutely right, sorry. My skim clearly skimmed over a crucial bit of info.

 

I tried using a tens machine 20yrs ago it had no benefit and seemed to make things worse .I would not recommend these devices to anyone .

 

Minor pain relief. Capsaicin cream better.

 

Cochrane never do overviews of all available treatments for a single patient population. These would be potentially quite useful, even if they only highlighted how there aren't any treatments with any decent evidence behind them (eg for ME). Instead they elect to do "overview reviews" of Cochrane reviews, on single well established treatments for loads of different patient populations. To conclude that all the trials of said well established treatment are garbage. No shit Sherlock. Utterly useless.

 

Actually - at least they specify how future research on TENS should be done. But should it be done?? It would now be unethical to do research on GET for ME. Maybe the same is true for TENS...? I don't know.

 

I love my TENS machine and find it has been incredibly helpful. Physio who originally suggested it (for chronic post operative pain, not ME) claimed it was only worked for 25% of people. For once, the odds were in my favour!

 

not TENs per se but there is an article in the Daily Mail
on a similar product Arc4Health which is being touted as a potential treatment for LC.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/...200-device-used-treat-injured-racehorses.html

At first I thought yeah right, another 'cure story with a gimmicky title', but looking on their website this bit jumped out

https://arcmicrotech.com/arc4health/science-of-microcurrent/

I've not looked into this further but would be interested to know if there is anything to back up this claim.

 

Sounds like straightforward pseudoscience.