How it Works

Muscle stimulation has been around since the Romans. They used electric eels to shock a patients muscle. It was very crude and probably not effective.

Invention of batteries in the 19th Century spurred on a new generation of treatment. Not much different from eels but easier to apply. Simple shocks to cure everything from dementia to hair loss and anything else they could think of.

Stimulation began to be scientific in the 1950s and 1960s with the emergence of electronics.
At first just simple stimulators with large energy output were made, just a little better than their predecessors.

Research began to realise that muscles were more complicated than first realised. This led to the first modern approach of using small pulses at predetermined frequencies.

How Muscles Really Work
It was discovered that there were two basic fibre types in the muscle.

Slow Twitch Fibres   fire the muscle at low frequencies, these take their energy supply from blood. These are relatively small, responsible mainly for posture, keeping joints together.
They are able to keep working for long periods.

Fast Twitch Fibres fire the muscles at higher frequencies and are responsible for force. Lifting carrying etc. These fibres take their energy from local glycogen supplies and have a short period of work. These are the muscles that ache when exerted too much. They take a lot of training to get them to do large amounts of work, but still only last a short time.
Therefore if stimulated for long periods, local energy is exhausted and the muscle may be damaged.

So each muscle is unique in its application (legs, arms, pelvic floor) and is therefore quite a complex combination of different fibres to do the job it is required to do for that part of the body.

Once this was discovered physiotherapists could set stimulators to suit the muscle types and injury required to rebuild it. This required the physiotherapist to change the settings as the muscle changed as it was exercised, building up the different fibres to regain as near full function as possible. The problem with single frequency stimulation is that it has to be used for the appropriate amount of time for each set frequency. The muscle also accommodates to a fixed frequency and treatment stagnates after a period of time.

Nuromed as a result of some research with several Universities & Physiotherapists devised a stimulator to change these patterns on its own. This meant that a program could be developed to give optimum treatment for different conditions.
By changing the mix of high and low frequencies, muscles had a warm up, exercise at appropriate levels for the condition and a cool down. This system is call sequential frequency stimulation. It gives a muscle a workout without tiring, or stressing it.
Sequential frequencies are a more natural way of treatment (more like the body treats it).
The sequence is set for different muscles and conditions, eliminating possible over use and stopping the muscles accommodating to fixed frequencies.