History
Electrotherapy of pain by neurostimulation began shortly after Melzack and Wall proposed the gate control theory in 1965. This theory proposed that nerves carrying painful peripheral stimuli and nerves carrying touch and vibratory sensation both terminate in the dorsal horn (the gate) of spinal cord. It was hypothesized that input to the latter could be manipulated to “close the gate” to the former. As an application of the gate control theory, Shealy et al. implanted the first spinal cord stimulator device directly on the dorsal column for the treatment of chronic pain and in 1971, Shimogi and colleagues first reported the analgesic properties of epidural spinal cord stimulation. Since then this technique has undergone numerous technical and clinical developments.
At this time neurostimulation for the treatment of pain is used with nerve stimulation, spinal cord stimulation, deep brain stimulation, and motor cortex stimulation.
Read more about this topic: Spinal Cord Stimulator
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the race.”
—Eliza Archard Connor, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 9, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)