David Zimmerman
While nociception’s role in pain generation is known and understood what is less certain are the processes that drive rapid and profound pain reduction or cessation, particularly when the physical ‘causes’ are reinstated where orthotic use has seen rapid and durable profound pain reduction. There is a balance between nociceptive and antinociceptive systems. This paper looks at unexpectedly rapid and yet durable reduction in pain suffered achieved using non-invasive therapy. Pain is by definition and neurologically is subject to thresholds, below which pain is not consciously perceived. Context is always relevant and enduring pain and/or impaired sleep poses a threat to health. Noting profound, rapid and durable loss of pain, either in terms of cognition or of afferent signaling there are great benefits clinically. The questions posed are whether the threshold of perceivable pain increases over time and with conditioning exposure, and secondly asks do pre-treatment thresholds remain high, even when the cause is removed? It is notable that such afferent supply, as demonstrated to be immediately reversible and switch back on, cannot be considered a neuropathic pain as there is no aberrant function of the receptors or nerves, nor is there a pathology associated with involved tissues such as cancer. The cited cases suffer from long term stimulation of these normal and healthy nerves but often misdiagnosed as chronic pain, neuropathic pain or allied to a disease process. Were this case reversal of motor-reflexes would not be related to position of an anatomical structure.
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International Journal of Neurorehabilitation received 1078 citations as per Google Scholar report
