Electronic Stimulation
Medicine and electronics are rapidly becoming a common partnership. Electronics and medicine has been around for over a hundred years. This application can be seen in early X-ray machines, as well as early doctors and healers who felt that electricity possessed something special that assisted the healing process of many illnesses and injuries. But it has not been the last forty to fifty years that the development and refinement of electricity as medical agent has occurred. Today the medical field can not imagine itself without the assistance of electricity and electronic components. In recent years some of the major development has occurred in one particular field of Medicine, electric stimulation. Electric stimulation is the application of electric current in treatment without the generation of intense heat. This includes electric stimulation of nerves or muscles, passage of current into the body, or use of interrupted current of low intensity to raise the threshold of the skin to pain. Studies suggested this therapy is applied to conditions such as ulcers, traumatic or burn wounds, osteoarthritis, and cancer. Electrical stimulation is simply the application of electrical pulses to the body, whether it is for funct
From this example you see how electricity and electronics is being applied into the medical field of electric stimulation and it can be displayed as possessing its own qualities that electricity possesses. Several experts claim that they feel that the field of electronics will do wonders for medicine in the next twenty years, whether it will be totally replacing hearts with electrical devices or using electric therapy to cure cancer. Many doctors and scientist do not know what will become of this. However, it is obvious that this field holds large potential. Here is an example of the effect of pulse duration on force. This data is taken from surface stimulation of the dorsiflexors at a stimulation voltage of 50V and a frequency 30 Hz. Adapted from: Functional Electrical Stimulation: Standing and Walking after Spinal Cord Injury. Kralj and Bajd, 1989 (see bibliography). The rate of rise of the pulse can also be important. Too slow a rise time results in changes in the tissue membrane known as accommodation, which gradually elevates the threshold required for the nerve to fire. The pulse used in electrical stimulation do not, in general, allow this effect to occur. The rate at which the nerve fibres fire is dependent on the frequency of pulse repetition. A single pulse produces a short lived muscle twitch of not more than 250ms. If pulses are repeated more frequently than this the muscle does not have time to relax in-between stimuli and eventually tetanic (continuous) contraction occurs. (http://www.slackinc.com:80/bone/ortoday/199605/counter.htm , 1999) Alternative Medicine, Electric Stimulation, Online, Webcrawler, 1999. http://www.surrey.ac.uk/MechEng/BioMed/de_page/fes_intr/fes_cont.html
Some common words found in the essay are:
Stimulation FNS, , Galvanic Interferential, Stimulation FES, Charge Balanced, Nerve Stimulation, electrical stimulation, net charge, faradic stimulation, electric current, electric stimulation, electrical pulses, application electrical pulses, application electrical, body tissues, externally applied, stimulation applied,
Approximate Word count = 1638
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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