TENS for pain.
Pain is hard to deal with at the best of times. The times we prepare for are not the best of times. The most common pain remedies are drugs, and the most potent of these drugs (the opiods such as morphine, codeine, and relatives) are very tightly regulated because they are major drugs of abuse.
Stockpiling them in case of emergency is probably not going to happen. All of this motivated me to start working on an article on pain management for preppers. The use of TENS units for this purpose seemed to warrant its very own article…so here it is.
What’s this TENS thing and how does it work?
TENS stands for transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. It’s been around for awhile — I did some work with the experimental units back in the dark ages when I was in college, in fact. The basic plan is you get a little battery-operated power pack to run an electrical current through a pair of electrodes situated on your skin (usually around the painful area, although it can work to stimulate other places).
TENS units are simple to use, non-invasive, and compact.
So why is that helpful? My first guess when I heard of it was that it would interrupt the transmission of the pain signals to the spinal cord .. but nope, that’s not it. There’s some disagreement on what is happening, which seems to arise from the fact that there’s more than one mechanism going on, depending on the type of electrical stimulus chosen.
One of the most useful mechanisms though seems to be something called lateral inhibition. Normally when you activate sense receptors, their nerves stifle information from surrounding areas — it’s sort of like using the ‘sharpening’ feature when photo editing. The TENS unit stimulation can get neurons around the painful area firing and they suppress the pain signals from the damaged area.
One of the ways TENS seems to work. If the TENS unit activates neuron B, it can suppress the signals in neurons A and C … which might be trying to send pain signals. Thanks Tomwsulcer for the image.
How do you use a TENS unit?
Getting a unit is simple; they are available without prescription in the United States. I’d suggest that, as a prepper, you get one that works well with replaceable, rechargeable batteries; and stock plenty of batteries and a solar charger or two. Put them in a Faraday cage container if EMP is one of your concerns. At about $20 for some units, it’s realistic to be able to stock multiples; and unlike many pain medications a TENS unit won’t have a short shelf life if you take good care of the batteries.
A solar charger (or two) and some rechargeable batteries makes a TENS unit into a solution that won’t last forever, but is likely to outlast drug supplies by a good margin.
Choosing settings is an important consideration, since effectiveness depends on getting good settings, and those can vary by the kind of pain and by the person. I’m not going to make recommendations, both because I’m not a physician and therefore not in the business of making medical recommendations and because it’s so variable that talking it over with a physician or physical therapist is worth the effort.
Pro tip: Developing tolerance to pain treatments (where the treatment doesn’t work as well after a while of steady use) is a common issue, and TENS can show that problem too. Both low and high frequency TENS settings can be effective. Switching up which frequencies are used has been shown to delay the onset of tolerance, as can interspersing periods in which TENS is not used.
Benefits and drawbacks
TENS doesn’t work for everyone, although it does work for lots of people (and the fact that it works well in rats proves that it’s not just a placebo effect). It can also take some experimentation to find the best frequencies and intensities for a given person and situation. High intensities can cause muscle activation, which means your muscles around the TENS area contract without your telling them to. That’s harmless, but I for one found it a bit … disconcerting at first. Anything electronic can break, so this is not likely to be a decades-long solution. It doesn’t work for every kind of pain, either.
On the other hand, TENS does work for many people. It has very few side effects; far fewer than drug treatments for pain. It’s non-invasive (particularly important when there isn’t medical help around to deal with infections that invade through breaks in the skin) and non-addictive. Addicts won’t break into your house to steal your TENS unit, either.
Wounds may heal faster when TENS is used as well, as electrical stimulation seems to improve blood flow and perhaps the activity of the cells that do the healing.
Pro tip:
One might be tempted to stack, using TENS units to stretch out the value of whatever opioid drugs are used. Not a good plan. Apparently TENS works in part by using some of the same neurons that opiod drugs mess with, because organisms who have been dosed with opioids don’t get as much benefit from the TENS.
A couple of the more useful sources I read in support of this article:
*DeSantana, J. M., Walsh, D. M., Vance, C., Rakel, B. A., & Sluka, K. A. (2008). Effectiveness of Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation for Treatment of Hyperalgesia and Pain. Current Rheumatology Reports, 10(6), 492–499.
*Iain Jones, MB ChB FRCA, Mark I. Johnson, PhD; Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, Continuing Education in Anaesthesia Critical Care & Pain, Volume 9, Issue 4, 1 August 2009, Pages 130–135, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaceaccp/mkp021
NOTE: This article contains some material we have previously published but that was replaced by this updated and expanded article.