Chronic pain refers to pain that lasts for more than 3 months. This major global health problem afflicts nearly 100 million patients in the United States and places a serious medical burden on both countries and individuals. Many common pain treatments are not effective in treating chronic pain (especially neuropathic pain caused by somatosensory nervous system damage or disease) and may increase the risk of drug-related adverse outcomes such as addiction and multidrug therapy. Current clinical guidelines recommend non-pharmacological therapies, one of which is electrical stimulation analgesia, including two types: transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) and scrambler therapy. This article outlines the physiological effects, techniques, and safety of each therapy, analyzes and summarizes the results of randomized controlled trials of electrical stimulation analgesic therapy for cancer-related pain, other disease-related pain, and neuropathic pain, and discusses the limitations of current study data.
