In the 1990s, it is difficult to open a newspaper or watch television and not find someone claiming that magnets promote healing. Rarely do these claims stem from double-blind, peer-reviewed studies, making it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. The current fads resemble those at the end of the last century, when many were falsely touting the benefits of direct electrical and weak m...

This review presents technologies used in and assesses the main clinical outcomes of electrical therapies designed to speed up and increase functional recovery in stroke patients. The review describes methods which interface peripheral systems (e.g., cyclic neural stimulation, stimulation triggered by electrical activity of muscles, therapeutic functional electrical stimulation) and transcrania...

Afferent input caused by electrical stimulation of a peripheral nerve increases corticospinal excitability during voluntary contractions, indicating that proprioceptive sensory input arriving at the cortex plays a fundamental role in modulating corticospinal excitability. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the effect of electrical stimulation on the corticospinal excitability ...

[N A J Med Sci. 2009;2(2):67-68.] Many studies suggested that acupuncture or electrical acupuncture may improve the symptoms of autism. However, the efficacy of the treatment is not satisfied. To improve the existing methodology of acupuncture in treating autism, a concept of transcranial electrical acupuncture stimulation (TEAS) is proposed based on the primary clinical experiences and literat...

Transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) is a proposed tool for noninvasively modulating human brain circuits, but its ability to affect cortical physiology remains unclear. A recent study merged TES with live animal and human cadaveric recordings to verify intracranial electrical effects, then used these findings to develop a novel neuromodulation protocol.

Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) are electrical signals recorded from neural tissue or muscle after activation of central motor pathways. They complement other clinical neurophysiology techniques, such as somatosensory evoked potentials (SEPs), in the assessment of the nervous system, especially during intraoperative neurophysiologic monitoring (IONM). Somatosensory evoked potentials directly ass...

Abstract Background: Preliminary studies showed possible therapeutic efficacy of multisession transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over auditory cortex (AC) for chronic tinnitus; however, the findings are controversial. Objective: To investigate effects repeated sessions bilateral tDCS AC on tinnitus symptoms in intractable tinnitus. Methods: A double blinded randomized placebo contro...

Electrical stimulation is used for example to treat neuronal disorders and depression with deep brain stimulation or transcranial electrical stimulation. Depending on the application, different electrodes are used and thus different electrical characteristics exist, which have to be handled by the stimulator. Without a measuring device the user would have to rely on the stimulator being able to...

BACKGROUND Chronic non-specific low back pain is a major socioeconomic public health issue worldwide and, despite the volume of research in the area, it is still a difficult-to-treat condition. The conservative analgesic therapy usually comprises a variety of pharmacological and non-pharmacological strategies, such as transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. The neuromatrix pain model and t...