Neuroscience Dissertation Introduction - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... Whenever we fall or cut ourselves we experience pain, sometimes unbearable. Hence, our body tells us to take adequate care of that part so that the damage is looked after. We take the help of various pain killers that are available in the market to control and get rid of the pain. Apart from the medicines, anesthesia is also used to numb the pain. People are given local anesthesia before an operation. These are medicines which mix in our blood and we don’t feel the pain. Thus, the basic purpose of the pain killers is to numb the problem organ so that we do not feel any pain.
It is one of the pain killers, which is the application of electric current through our skin for pain control. This research will showcase the reasons behind its working. We will also notice the intensity and the duration of the current passed into our skin. The unit used for this is called the TENS that is Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation. TENS is unlike any other pain killers as it does not penetrate into the body. It is a safe nerve stimulation intended to reduce pain, both acute and chronic. There are results to show that TENS can be used as the best pain killer.
The constant mode of TENS is found to give a better post analgesic effect for TENS users with chronic pain in clinical trials. However no one has investigated how the harmless feelings can be affected by constant mode TENS. Harmless or non-noxious stimulation is generally used by the animal to make it aware of the state of its body and of its immediate environment. This can be tested by using a non-painful stimulation method, 2 point discrimination test. Any changes after the TENS treatment can affect the awareness of movements and relative position of body parts. This can be a potential issue for some TENS users with balance problem. An experiment was done on this and was found that constant mode TENS gives a higher pain threshold than frequency modulated TENS during ...Download file to see next pagesRead More