Next, we’ll try electric shock therapy.

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As if sticking needles in my back wasn’t fun enough, the chiropractor suggested we try a little electric stimulus for my back pain. Now that sounds awesome and all, but I still remember a dozen-plus years ago when my then-husband was playing with a little Jacob’s Ladder he’d made. It left burn-holes in his t-shirt where the electricity decided to escape via his shoulder. Yeah, not thrilled with the idea of any added electricity in my body.

not me, but a similarly hued woman
But she says electrotherapy will be good, ease the pain. Maybe, we can hope, get my back muscles to stop going into spasms that last for hours. At the possibility of that, I consented.

The why of it working for pain relief isn’t really well-documented from what I can find, but the ideas floated around are that it:

  • tires out the muscles so they relax,
  • releases endorphins, our body’s own painkiller, and/or
  • blocks the nerves from sending pain signals to the brain.

Now, I don’t know if it did any of that for me, really. I was completely sidetracked by the fact that my left shoulder (and eventually my right, too) was dancing on its own. Up, down, back, up, up, down, up, down, up, back, up. It was going at its own rhythm, dancing to the tune only it could hear through the electricity streaming into my back. For ten minutes. It was weird.

I want to do it again just to see if we can get my shoulders to move in sync.

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