B. Electrotherapy

What Is Electrotherapy?
Electrotherapy has provided people with a drug-free, non-invasive and non-addictive treatment option. With that, it poses minimal risk for side effects and complications due to adverse drug effects. While it offers several inherent advantages over orthodox medical treatments for pain and for more of man’s common health complaints, a number of electrotherapy modalities were developed to offer the safest lifelong solution to managing the symptoms of chronic health conditions.

Nature of Treatment
Electrotherapy is a treatment based on electrical stimulation. It uses a specific range of energy waves of an electromagnetic spectrum to produce the desired physiological as well as chemical body responses. Unlike drugs and any other forms of treatment, it helps improve and manage a number of symptoms without compromising health due to side effects.

Modalities
There are two common modalities of electrotherapy that are used to treat a variety of diseases: Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) and Interferential Current (IFC). These are mainly used to relieve pain by stimulating proprioception nerve fibers to block or slow down the transmission of pain signals.

Purpose
Electrotherapy is known to treat pain due to post-operative incisions, fractures, arthritic inflammation or tendinitis, muscle loss or weakness and depression. The main therapeutic purposes of electrotherapy include pain relief and muscle contraction stimulation.

How it Works
To manage acute and chronic pain, the electrotherapy uses electric signals to interfere with the transmission of neural pain signals into the brain. It effectively slows down neural signal transmission to lessen the pain and make it more bearable for the patient. Electrotherapy uses electric signals to introduce heat into the deep tissues. This deep heating procedure increases blood flow to and from the affected region to improve drainage. To stimulate muscle contraction during rehabilitation, it draws a specific amount of current into the problematic area to relieve muscle spasms, re-educate the muscles after trauma and prevent muscle atrophy.