History
During 1855 Guillaume Duchenne, the developer of electrotherapy, announced that alternating was superior to direct current for electrotherapeutic triggering of muscle contractions. What he called the 'warming affect' of direct currents irritated the skin, since, at voltage strengths needed for muscle contractions, they cause the skin to blister (at the anode) and pit (at the cathode). Furthermore, with DC each contraction required the current to be stopped and restarted. Moreover alternating current could produce strong muscle contractions regardless of the condition of the muscle, whereas DC-induced contractions were strong if the muscle was strong, and weak if the muscle was weak.
Since that time almost all rehabilitation involving muscle contraction has been done with a symmetrical rectangular biphasic waveform. During the 1940s, however, the U.S. War Department, investigating the application of electrical stimulation not just to retard and prevent atrophy but to restore muscle mass and strength, employed what was termed galvanic exercise on the atrophied hands of patients who had an ulnar nerve lesion from surgery upon a wound. These Galvanic exercises employed a monophasic wave form, direct current.
In the field of cancer treatment, DC electrotherapy showed promise as early as 1959, when a study published in the Journal SCIENCE reported total destruction of tumor in 60% of subjects, which was very noteworthy for an initial study. In 1985, the journal CANCER RESEARCH published the most remarkable such study, reporting 98% shrinkage of tumor in animal subjects on being treated with DC electrotherapy for only 5 hours over 5 days. The mechanism for the effectiveness of DC electrotherapy in treating cancer was suggested in an article published in 1997. The free-radical (unpaired electron) containing active-site of enzyme Ribonucleotide Reductase, RnR -- which controls the rate-limiting step in the synthesis of DNA -- can be disabled by a stream of passing electrons.
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