Originally Posted by
cjurakpt
TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation), while helpful when on, does, unfortunately, little to nothing in terms of actually solving the problem (beyond possibly giving you relief to get you out of pain, in order for you to do something more long term), because TENS is the equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and singing "la la la" when you don't want to listen to something else; the mechanism involves sending more "noise" into the pain fibers, effectively taking up all the space so that the pain signals are shoved out; but it doesn't do anything to the muscles per se (hence the name); NMES (neuromuscular electircal stimulation) is what actually causes muscles to contract in various ways, and can have various therapeutic benefits (such ass resetting the reflex contraction threshold, turning off on-going spasm, clearing inflammation and bringing in more oxygenated blood) depending on how it's used and what you do during and after