Articles: pain-management.
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Cryotherapy has been clinically applied to relieve pain using a new cryosurgical probe to block peripheral nerve function to achieve analgesia. Sixty-four patients with intractable pain were treated with cryoanalgesia. Fifty-two obtained relief of pain for a median duration of 11 days and a range of up to 224 days.
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Chronic non-rheumatic pain in the aged should be viewed in the context of physiologic and clinical alterations due to aging which may create diagnostic problems. In the elderly, the abnormality of the clinical presentation and the patient's failure to remember the time and the nature of the precipitating incident may be extremely misleading. Many clinical features may also be altered by the aging process itself. ⋯ The prescription of combination preparations may involve use of a drug that is beneficial for one disorder but harmful for another. Aged persons display a marked tendency toward abnormal reactions to the usual drug regimens. A wise combination of treatment by medical means (including drugs), physiotherapy, and sometimes surgical procedures, usually is effective for the relief of this type of chronic pain.
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Medical instrumentation · Nov 1975
Historical ArticleA survey of the history of electrical stimulation for pain to 1900.
This paper traces the history of the use of electricity to treat pain, beginning with the first century A. D. practice of using the torpedo fish to treat gout, continuing through the eighteenth-century use of electrostimulation as an analgesic, up to 1900 when electroanalgesia fell into disrepute. The author recognizes the early empiric nature of electrotherapy as it was catalogued by the Reverend John Wesley, and the beginnings of speculation on the mechanism of pain relief by Berlioz, Sarlandière, and others.
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Five patients out of a group of ten who had dorsal column electrodes implanted for the relief of chronic pain were examined for the influence of the stimulation on the spontaneous pain and on the thresholds for touch, vibration and cutaneous pain induced by pinching. Stimulation producing paraesthesias resulted in an almost immediate abolishment of spontaneous pain and was accompanied by significant elevations of both tactile and vibratory thresholds. ⋯ Elevation of sensory thresholds is presumably not due to blocking of the primary neurones but to central inhibitory mechanisms. The thresholds for induced cutaneous pain were not influenced by dorsal column stimulation except for one case in whom an abnormally low threshold within an hyperaestethic area became normalized.