Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation for the Treatment of Pain in Physiotherapy Practices in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom—A Survey of Usage and Perceived Effectiveness Compared With Other Pain Relieving Modalities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study compared the use and perceived effectiveness of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) with other electrophysical modalities for pain management by physiotherapists (PTs) in Hong Kong (HK) and the United Kingdom (UK). Two random samples (n = 600 each) of HK and UK PTs were mailed questionnaires. Four hundred and sixteen out of 1,200 respondents (34.7%) returned fully completed questionnaires (HK,34.2%; UK, 35.2%). A significant difference was found in the type of electrodes used (p < 0.001); self-adhesive electrodes were used more commonly in the UK (UK, 73.0%; HK, 18.4%), compared with carbon rubber electrodes and gel in HK (HK, 75.6%; UK, 15.7%). A significantly higher percentage of HK PTs reported receiving an undergraduate education in TENS (84.4% vs. 43.1%; p < 0.001). Acupuncture was used more in the UK (67.7%) than in HK (48.8%; p < 0.001), but it was rated equally effective, especially for chronic pain. There were significant differences in perceived effectiveness of TENS for chronic pain (p < 0.001); TENS was rated second most effective for the management of chronic pain by UK PTs and fourth by HK PTs. This survey has highlighted differences in the patterns of use and perceived effectiveness of TENS and other modalities in the UK and HK.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".