Electrotherapy – The Science Of Healing and Restoration of Function

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For decades forms of electricity have been applied to the body to make the body heal itself. Originally the use of electrotherapy was to correct a situation where the body was not healing itself. One of the first uses for tissue healing was to use what was then called “high voltage” current, applied to non healing wounds or decubitus ulcers. Wound specialists would apply two electrodes around a wound, or in some situations one electrode in the wound and one out, and turn the unit on for approximately 20 minutes 3x week to get the wound healed. The claim was the form of electrical current, known as “dual peaked spike wave”, was the effective form of current. The high voltage unit did as expected and bed sores started healing when there was sufficient nutrition for the body to heal.

Later the simple device called a “tens machine” also helped heal bedsores. The tens machine had a current, or wave form, known as “biphasic square with a net 0 DC effect”. Not easy to understand is it?

Literally there are Billions ( that’s literally with a B ) of potential wave form varieties and the “game” was on to claim some form of special knowledge that your machine did the “one and only” waveform that worked for the specific condition of the patient. Soon we had what are called “bone growth stimulators”, or “non union fracture machines”, which were applied to crushed bones which were not healing. The orthopedic physician would stabilize, cast, treat, however if the bones would not unionize the result was amputation. A dangling limb causes all sorts of issues for the overall health of the patient. Soon another electrotherapy machine emerged and there was another “new” wave form, or current device, that supposedly “exclusively” healed bones. Again a mystery of the “secret current”.

Today it is becoming common practice among orthopedic doctors, soon to be common with general surgeons, to use a tens machine to “control pain”, but are these devices also increasing the rate of healing?

My hopefully educated opinion is the waveform, and the current are secondary in accelerating the healing processes of our body. The commonality of practically all these devices is the changing polarities. Most of these device alternate between positive and negative charges. In understanding what excites our cells to act and, do so quicker, it’s almost always the changing of tissue and space between cells of polarity. Like a magnet when you put north end to north end you repel, south to north and you attract. Bones have polarities on each end of a bone, and on the bone particles. This is the same state for cells within our body when damaged or diseased. When one end of a bone, or cells within, becomes more positive, and the end to reattach to is more negative, then they grow together or unionize. The waveform is not doing it but the physical attraction of positive and negative charges, are the healing agents.

Soft tissue and bone tissue cells grow and replicate the same way. The active agents responsible for the emerging use of electrotherapy in tissue repair is not a waveform per se, it’s the understanding of how our body uses negative and positive charges to heal and attract.