A micro-review of microcurrent therapy

Today I return to my roots a bit with a snarky and eye-rolling review of a really silly kind of treatment for pain. There’s no science to report on here, just bad ideas: microcurrent therapy is ridiculous. 🙄

So strap yourself in for a little tell-us-what-you-really-think debunking!

Microcurrent therapy is a variant of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), so let’s start with some basics about TENS. (Which is also ridiculous. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely useless, but it’s minor benefits are absurd relative to its status as a staple of physical therapy. We’re talking about something that’s probably not even as useful as a heating pad.)

Humans love stimulants! We’ve always enjoyed zapping ourselves and each other. TENS tries to treat pain by passing alternating current through superficial tissues causing tingling sensations, with brief and minor benefits that are probably just a “sensation-enhanced” placebo. The evidence on TENS is overwhelmingly negative, and yet it has been a therapeutic staple in physical therapy and chronic pain clinics for decades, and there are many consumer TENS gadgets.

One of the ways TENS stays alive is what I call the “configuration gambit” — the claim that just the right settings will do the job, and the only reason all the evidence is negative is that somehow no researcher has ever tested TENS with the right settings. You see the configuration gambit with all the techno-therapies, e.g. laser therapy, ultrasound, and so on.

Fiddle with the dials and variables enough, and you get a new therapy. Like microcurrent therapy.

Maybe subtle zapping will succeed where stronger has failed? Less is more?

Microcurrent therapy (MCT) is just a very-low-power version of TENS. Nothing more than TENS, but definitely less — that’s the point of it. MCT supposedly mimics natural bioelectric signalling in the human body, but it’s the homeopathy of the electrotherapies, with no plausible active ingredient. (Homeopathy being the use of exotically faint traces of extremely diluted substances as medicine. Most people underestimate just how strange homeopathy is — it is not an “herbal” remedy, but a “magical” one, as fanciful as the Force from Star Wars.)

The therapist deploying MCT fancies themselves a “cell whisperer,” a great example of traditional delusion in this business: the belief that the real therapeutic power is counter-intuitively found in the most delicate and subtle of methods, a conceit mostly taken from Asian mysticism (think “5-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique”). The exact physiological mechanisms of such methods are always vague and implied, because it is impossible to be specific about wildly speculative and implausible nonsense.

Trying to helpfully manipulate cells into doing healthier things by tickling them with microcurrents is like trying to improve a jungle ecosystem by making making monkey noises, ook ook. There isn’t any reason to think that cells are going to work better just because we use a clumsy gadget to generate some electrical “static” for them to listen to.

Concluding as kindly as possible: MCT is virtually unstudied, and a highly experimental medicine, a dilution of something that doesn’t even work at full strength.

Being unkind? Despite the veneer of sophistication, microcurrent therapy is just blatant quackery, based on almost childishly naïve ideas about biology.

“Less is not more. More is more!” ~ Miss Piggy

This post is a fresh excerpt from my full review of all forms of electrotherapy and neuromodulation (but mostly TENS).