TENS or Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation is a way of treating pain in several types of health conditions. It is most often used for treating muscle, bone, or even joint problems. The most common applications here include low back pain relief, neck pain, and many other conditions.
While it is an amazing way to deal with pain, mistakes can reduce efficiency. So, avoiding all the mistakes while using TENS is very important. Here we will be discussing the most common mistakes that you must avoid while using TENS unit pads.
Mistakes that you must avoid when using TENS.
The following are the mistakes that you must avoid when you use TENS for the best efficiency.
1. Using it at an inadequate Intensity.
When you are using TENS unit pads, the Intensity of the amperage of treatment must be adequate according to the patient’s conditions. There must be a small change in the Intensity for an everyday patient to achieve muscle contraction for pain relief. However, it depends on the patient, so every patient must get adequate Intensity while using TENS unit pads.
2. Not using the right frequency.
When you are using TENS unit pads, different frequencies are used for stimulating different nerve fibers. In general, 50 to 200 Hz of frequency is used for acute pain for stimulating the sensory-motor fibers. On the other hand, the low frequency of 1 to 15 Hz is used for chronic pain to stimulate the motor fibers.
So, depending on the condition of the patient and the pain treatment required, the frequency must be used adequately.
3. Overlooking the patient resistance
Resistance tells a lot about the results and efficiency of TENS, while it is the thing that is overlooked at the same time. There are a lot of factors that increase the resistance when using TENS electrode pads. Some of those are:
- Dehydrated skin
- Worn out adhesive present on the surface of electrodes.
- Scar tissue
- Failure to remove the barrier creams.
While these factors increase the resistance, the cuts and similar things decrease the patient resistance so that it can get hypersensitive in either case. So, patient resistance must never be avoided when using TENS of electrode pads.
4. Stopping treatment if there is an infection.
It is a very common mistake that most people make while using TENS of electrode pads. They stop treatment when there is an infection or symptoms of infection start to appear. However, TENS have bactericidal effects because of the electricity, so the treatment must be continued.
One case where you must never keep the treatment continued and is in the case of osteomyelitis because TENS can cause an abscess in that area.
Final Remarks:
TENS is an amazing solution when it comes to the treatment of several types of pain and other illness conditions. It is very effective in most cases. However, people make some mistakes, and those mistakes can lead to inefficiency in the results of TENS. Here we were discussing the mistakes that you must avoid when using TENS electrode pads.