Calmare Therapeutics Inc (fka CTTC)

[powderbum]

Does Calmare really work?

20 studies representing over 900 patients:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4973603/

His research team wasn’t alone in finding scrambler therapy was effective. An article in the journal Supportive Care in Cancer said 19 out of 20 reports on scrambler therapy came up with positive results.

It’s a nuanced treatment, Coyne said. “A nurse is going to be sitting at the bedside and adjusting the dials. It will be different each time, and the leads will change because the pain typically gets smaller with each treatment. Really, what it’s trying to do is, when the nerves fire, it’s firing against them. So the pulsation never makes it to the brain and you don’t feel pain. And in doing so, we know it changes the way calcium is absorbed. Nerves that fire a lot actually are sometimes calcium deprived. You’re trying to reset the nerves to normal.”

Coyne said research shows patients who had scrambler therapy showed improvements in their natural pain-fighting reserves. “They get depleted when they’re fighting pain all the time. We found their endorphins changed.

Does Scrambler Therapy actually work?

Arguments against Scrambler Therapy certainly exist, with critics attributing much of the benefit to a placebo effect. Some of the positive endorsements in social media and on the Internet are only anecdotal. Additionally, the developer of Scrambler Therapy participated in the initial clinical trials, and this could be perceived as a potential conflict of interest even though it is scientifically desirable and logical to expect the device inventor to report the first set of results. Additionally, some of the reports claim that there is a phenomenal benefit that lasts for a long time, which sounds too good to be true. Lastly, there are no large, placebo-controlled, double-blinded clinical trials to estimate the effectiveness of Scrambler Therapy.

On the other hand, while some reports [13, 20, 24, 25] involved the inventor of the Scrambler device, these positive findings have been independently replicated by diverse groups [15–19, 21–23, 26–30] in nearly all of the reported studies, involving over 900 patients in total. In some cases, the benefit achieved has been substantial, with some patients achieving complete pain resolution and substantially reduced dependence on pharmacologic therapy. There has been only one report of a negative experience [16]. This was from one small, placebo-controlled trial in patients with chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy. This was published only as an abstract, did not show much of a reduction in either study arm (arguing against a placebo effect), and was produced by a group that did not have much experience using Scrambler Therapy. This raises concerns regarding the validity of this trial, as data have supported that there is an extended learning curve with the provision of Scrambler Therapy, particularly for chemotherapy-induced neuropathy [22]. At the same time, it must be noted that although this is the only negative trial published on Scrambler Therapy, the possibility of publication bias cannot be excluded. Negative experiences may not be put into publication form for various reasons, and so the currently available literature may be overestimating the positive experience with this technology.