For Chronic Pain?

Autor: Debra Eitelman Moore, H. Martin Blacker
Rok vydání: 1983
Předmět:
Zdroj: The American Journal of Nursing. 83:1175
ISSN: 0002-936X
DOI: 10.2307/3463445
Popis: Chronic pain often becomes a chronic problem for health care professionals as well as for patients. The failure of each intervention keeps the pain and the patient returning. As medical bills and frustrations mount, the patient's productivity and hope for a pain-free life dwindle. To find out if transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) would offer a safe and simple approach to chronic pain, we tried TENS on 98 patients in an outpatient pain clinic(1). Over a two-year period, we used TENS on 50 males, aged 19 to 71 years (mean age 45), and 48 females, aged 23 to 81 years old (mean age of 43). Duration of chronic pain ranged from less than six months in three patients to more than twenty years in five patients. Over half (59) had back pain, 15 had headaches, and 25 had extremity, intercostal or chest, or other pain. Each participated in a 12-day program. The first or second day, a nurse clinician taught the patient about the unit, electrode placement, and skin care. Proper electrode placement is essential to the success of TENS. In descending order of preference, we advised patients to place them: * directly over the painful area or structure; * at trigger points along the nerve pathway (especially useful for radiating limb pain); * at trigger points in the same dermatome as the pain and/or area controlled by the corresponding spinal segment; or * at points distal to pain (as in the "hoku" acupuncture points for headaches)(2). Usually only the first, and sometimes the second, position was
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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