Rehabilitation and Therapy Commons^™

The Hypoalgesic Effect Of Tens During Needle Emg Study, Wang-Lin Su, Hsuan-Yi Lin, Gwo-Chi Hu

Rehabilitation Practice and Science

Needle electromyography (EMG) is an important diagnostic and prognostic tool in physical medicine. However, some patients are unable to tolerate the pain associated with the procedure. While there has been research in methods aimed at reducing the pain from needle EMG, all have obvious disadvantages.TENS is a widely accepted tool for producing analgesia, but it has not been studied as an analgesic adjunct to needle EMG. We designed a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study to investigate the effectiveness of TENS on alleviating the pain during a needle EMG study.Fifty-nine subjects undergoing needle EMG study in an upper extremity were randomly assigned …