Reader response: Hey, I just bought a TENs unit for backpain. Can you give me more information about the safety and what you use? I have unbearable menstrual pain but cant take bc, and end up missing work for 2-3 days because of it.

For those who don’t know, TENS units (short for Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) are little zappy things that stimulate your muscles. After they’ve been stimulated for a while, muscles automatically relax as part of the body’s effort to recover from the recent exertion. TENS units do that artificially via electrodes, which is why chiropractors, PTs, and massage therapists use them to help an overly-hypertonic or spasmed muscle to relax. I only bought my TENS unit recently. This is the model that I purchased from Amazon for about $30, which has several different settings and a dial on top to turn the voltage up or down, along with a manual that tells you how to use it safely. It requires a 9-volt battery, so while you can hurt yourself using it, you can’t do all that much damage even if you crank it up all the way; still, the smaller the area of the body that you’re applying the stimulation to, the lower the voltage you want to use. If you’re applying it to your trunk, like your lower back, you can maybe go up to a 3; on your hand, a 1. The trick is to start low and slowly crank up the voltage until you hit the spot you want to be at.

The best way to use a TENS unit, in my experience, is to put one electrode near one end of a muscle and the other at the other end. That way the current runs down the whole length of the muscle. Obviously, however, this depends on you knowing or being able to figure out the anatomical position of a muscle’s origin and insertion points.

So really, the layman’s best bet of using a TENS unit is to slap the electrodes on the general area that hurts (don’t let them touch each other!) and turn it on low. You won’t get the pinpointed stimulation of the muscles that will help you most, but it’ll still relax the general area, and it feels good, too. Sorta like a vibration.

I can’t speak to using it for menstrual pain, so I do encourage you to seek out additional resources before you give that a shot.

I hope this helped!

We Are All Ghosts (made of connective tissue)

"Doris Taylor doesn't take it as an insult when people call her Dr Frankenstein. “It was actually one of the bigger compliments I've gotten,” she says — an affirmation that her research is pushing the boundaries of the possible. Given the nature of her work as director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Taylor has to admit that the comparison is apt. She regularly harvests organs such as hearts and lungs from the newly dead, re-engineers them starting from the cells and attempts to bring them back to life in the hope that they might beat or breathe again in the living. Taylor is in the vanguard of researchers looking to engineer entire new organs, to enable transplants without the risk of rejection by the recipient's immune system. The strategy is simple enough in principle. First remove all the cells from a dead organ — it does not even have to be from a human — then take the protein scaffold left behind and repopulate it with stem cells immunologically matched to the patient in need. Voilà! The crippling shortage of transplantable organs around the world is solved."

Nature.com

Above is a "ghost heart," a pig heart that has been stripped down to its protein scaffolding. The reason that it's white is because that protein scaffolding is called connective tissue, and connective tissue is white. There is more connective tissue in the human body than any other type, period: bone, fat, blood, tendons, ligaments, the inner and outer lining of all our organs/nerves/muscles…ALL of that is connective tissue. Theoretically if you de-cellularized the entire body we would still hold our shape, just like this pig heart has done.

This is why, as a massage therapist, I emphasize care of connective tissue so much when I talk to my clients, and the number one thing you need to do to take care of your connective tissue is: drink water. CT is made up of ground substance (basically water + protein molecules) and a matrix of protein fiber strands.

Think of it like a pot of soup. When the body is dehydrated, the soup thickens and gets too sticky and we get fascial adhesions between our muscles; the same happens if the body gets too cold or if the body has been inactive for too long (cold, unstirred soup tends to clump and so does unmoved CT). That's why your body gets stiff when it's cold outside or if you've been sitting or lying in one position for a while. That's also why it’s so important to warm up before you stretch and to stretch before you work out: soup that has been warmed up and stirred is much easier to move than soup that has been cold and still.

Take care of your soup!