Introduction: We live in time when low back pain is one of the most common medical condictions. There are different ways of controlling this condiction, and one of them is use of Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS), where stimulation of nerve fibres Aα, Aβ in C nerve fibres affects pain and subjective or objective improvement of condiction. Improvement of condiction, caused by substance or intervention without therapeutic value (placebo), is called placebo effect. Purpose: To establish amount of placebo effect in treatment with Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation in patients with low back pain. Methodology: Overview of published technical and scientific literature online and book sources. Results: In all nine evaluated studies people with low back pain recieved active form of therapy (TENS) and placebo. Studies were randomized controlled and lasted from 2-12 weeks. Pain was evaluated by the visual analogue scale (VAS), before and after treatment programme. Placebo effect was clearly noticed in two of all studies, where it was concluded that placebo is as much effective as transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. Conclusions of other studies show that TENS or any other active form of used therapy is more effective than placebo, since findings of their studies show that placebo effect is neglibigle. Disccusion and conclusion: Overview of studies shows that opinion about placebo effect is discordant. There are studies which show that placebo is equivalent to TENS; still, there are others who show that placebo is not effective as TENS is. Further investigations are needed to answer the incomplete question about placebo treatment effect.
|
