Clinical research on the efficacy of TENS

The acceptance of a treatment into mainstream medicine is influenced by a wide variety of factors. Traditionally, practitioners rely on information gleaned from their experience of using treatments on their patients although this can be misleading. Clinical research uses experiments to determine whether therapeutic effects of a treatment are attributed to its active ingredient by removing biases that confound clinical observation. This helps to determine whether treatments are efficacious. The purpose of this chapter is to overview evidence from clinical research on the efficacy of TENS for the management of pain by covering evidence-based practice, clinical research on acute pain including post-operative pain and labour pain, chronic musculoskeletal pain, including back pain and osteoarthritis, chronic neuropathic pain, including peripheral and central neuropathic pain, and cancer pain. It also discusses challenges in TENS research.