 The
Use of Microcurrent Electrical Therapy and Cranial
Electrotherapy Stimulation in Pain ControlArun D.
Kulkarni, MD, Ray B. Smith, PhD
Clinical Practice of Alternative Medicine. Volume 2, Number 2, Summer
2001
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significant with this number of subjects. When. this was broken down
into those whose pain had lasted less than a year and compared with
those whose pain had lasted 5 years or more, the correlation was -0.05
and -0.42, neither of which was statistically significant.
When correlations between the various columns in Table I were
calculated, the only one of significance (r=.53) was between the
number of years patients had experienced the presenting pain and the
number of treatments they came for. In other words, patients who had
experience their pain longer may have been either more desperate to
try anything new that might work, or they were more used to attendance
at pain clinics.
When years of pain, number of treatments given, and prescore pain
intensity were held constant in a multilinear regression, the percent
improvement in the patients correlated strongly across these study
elements (r=.85), leaving an unusually small error variance of 28%
unaccounted for. That suggests that the improvement seen in the study
was due directly to the effect of the CES and MET treatment, with
little input from extraneous variables.
Patients had been asked to note any negative side effects of CES or
MET during the study. No negative side effects were reported.
Discussion
CES, originally called electrosleep, is not new to the Indian
subcontinent, having been studied in both humans and monkeys back in
1971.'2 The goal of Singh et al's study was to determine the effect of
CES on subjects' EEGs as it related to sleep and consciousness
mechanisms. Only recently has CES begun to come into its own as a pain
treatment modality. MET is also slowly coming to be seen as distinctly
different from 'YENS as a pain treatment modality, as shown in the
present study design and in other studies cited above.'" While studies
have shown that CES can enhance or potentiate medications," it can
also potentiate the effects of such pain treatments as biofeedback.'
The present study shows, however, that CES and MET can stand together
or one as significant, drug-free treatments for otherwise intractable
chronic pain, as seen with the majority (70%) of the patients in the
present study.
Conclusions
While double-blind studies are now showing the effectiveness of CES as
a pain treatment, we have found no other study that has combined CES
and MET. We found the combination to be a very effective treatment for
the patients in the present study and have seen that this treatment is
very good for long-standing chronic pain as well as for pain of
shorter duration. We conclude that CES and MET would be an effective
addition to the treatment program in pain clinics.
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1989;6:120-123.FIGURE 2
Showing a typical placement of the probe
electrodes (as shown here, for shoulder pain)
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