難治性疼痛疾患に対するノイロソフターの臨床的効果

抄録

About 10% of the patients visiting our Pain-Clinic are classified as intractable pain diseases, which are at a standstill for their therapy with ineffectiveness by even the nerveblock and acupuncture therapies. The intractable pain diseases include, post-herpetic neuralgia, in which the nerve was affected by virus to cause eruption, and the patients complain of severe pain even after the eruption cicatricially cured, posttraumatic pain due to a car accident, stump pain of the extremities or phantom leg, and postoperative pain of biliary calculus.
To these patients, the Neuro-softer (a domestic, superficial low-frequency stimulator of acupoints) was loaned out as an auxotherapy which can be applied at home or in the hospital, and let them apply it by themselves to the locus of pain or to the acupoints. Thus, the therapy was found to improve the symptoms to some extent and to be effective to relieve pain in many of these patients.
In the present study, an attempt was m ade to examine for what type of diseases the Neuro-softer is effective, and to compare it with the transcutaneous nerve stimulation equipment (TNS), which is the same sort of a low-frequency stimulator, and was developed a few years ago and has been used in the United States.