About 10 months ago, Victorian pain specialist Dr Murray Taverner began using a Scrambler Therapy device on patients with chronic neuropathic pain.

Commonly called nerve pain, it’s a complex condition and notoriously difficult to treat. It’s a complication often found in cancer patients who have undergone chemotherapy.

The first person Dr Taverner successfully treated with scrambler technology was a 19-year-old man.

He’d been in a wheelchair since the age of 10 and had barely lived a functioning, engaged life. He suffered with a neuropathic condition called complex regional pain syndrome.

“He’d missed all of secondary school  and had not walked for that period of time,” Dr Taverner told The New Daily.

The boy had “been through” a couple of leading hospital pain clinics without success. He’d “defeated” a couple of Dr Taverner’s  interventions.

“He got no benefit whatsoever and remained in a wheelchair, dependent at home,” he said.

‘A monumental shift’

Just before Christmas, Dr Taverner tried the Scrambler Therapy with the teenager. Not much changed in the first two sessions.

After eight sessions, “he was able to stand for the first time in nine years”.

Pain specialist Dr Murray Taverner.

After 10 sessions, he was out of the wheelchair. He has apparently remained in remission.

“A monumental shift,” said Dr Taverner, medical director at Frankston Pain Clinic.

He tells other stories of patients who have had “revolutionary, life-changing” success with the technology.

In his experience, the device has been successful in one-in-three patients. But it’s relatively early days. Despite the obvious excitement in his voice, he doesn’t want to “over-sell” the device.

“It’s emerging technology,” he said.

The device was first approved in the US by the FDA in 2009. It wasn’t approved in Australia as a medical device by the Therapeutic Goods Administration until around 2019.

What is Scrambler therapy?

First trialled by Italian scientists in 2003, the therapy gets its name from military technology that scrambles or changes signals and information, making them unrecognisable.

Indeed, the non-invasive, drug-free therapy works by scrambling pain signals from damaged nerves and replacing them with healthy signals from nearby undamaged nerves.

This week, Nature published a review of 381 randomised clinical trials of Scrambler Technology by two John Hopkins Medicine pain specialists. They found that 80-90 per cent of people with chronic pain could find significant relief from the non-invasive strategy called scrambler therapy.

“Significant relief” translates to chronic pain being put into remission for up to nine months.

The researchers found that Scrambler Therapy offers relief that can “often be permanent”.

More about how it works

Dr Taverner described Scrambler Therapy as a form of “neuro-modulation” that changes the way nerves behave to desensitise the central nervous system.

He said the brain is responsible for interpreting different sensory messages from the body and may interpret the sensory message resulting from an injury as dangerous, and so create a sensation of pain.

However, with neuropathic pain or nerve pain, the brain can create pain even if there is no injury or external pain generators.

Scrambler Therapy sends a message of “no danger” along the nerves to the brain, which reduces or eradicates the sensation of pain.

Re-training the brain

The authors of the new study explain:

“Blocking this established signal transmission can undo the communication from damaged nerves to the brain that has led to the condition becoming chronic.”

Essentially, the brain is retrained to think that there really is no pain in the area that is being treated.

The study’s primary author is Thomas Smith, professor of palliative medicine at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Centre and a professor of oncology and medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“If you can block the ascending pain impulses and enhance the inhibitory system, you can potentially reset the brain so it doesn’t feel chronic pain nearly as badly,” said Dr Smith.

“Scrambler Therapy is the most exciting development I have seen in years – it’s effective, it’s non-invasive, it reduces opioid use substantially and it can be permanent.”

The treatment

The Scrambler Therapy unit looks like an electro-cardiogram machine. Electrodes are placed on the patients, around the area of chronic pain.

The sessions in Dr Taverner’s clinic are 40 minutes. If there is any pain during the treatment, the electrodes are moved until all that can be felt is a buzzing.

All going well, after two or three initial treatments, the pain symptoms go into remission for a short period of time.

The scrambler device was first approved by the FDA in 2009.

But after approximately 10 sessions, patients can experience continuous remission from pain.

Accoridng to a John Hopkins explainer, remission will last from three to nine months. When symptoms begin to return, one to two booster treatments tend to put the patient back into remission.

Typically, the remission period increases after consecutive booster treatments.

This is no small development

In 2020, there were 3.37 million Australians aged 15 and over living with chronic pain.

About half of those are aged 45 and over. As people age, they’re more prone to developing pain that lasts beyond normal healing time after
injury or illness (generally three to six months).

Chronic pain is a condition, and the pain experienced can be anything from mild to severe. For many people it is both stressful and debilitating.

So the promise that a device might permanently relieve chronic pain will no doubt get many people’s hopes up.

Dr Taverner said there were only six Scrambler machines in Australia. A set of 10 sessions tends to cost around $3000.

“But there is no Medicare coverage,” said Dr Taverner. And there is no access to the treatment in the public system.

It’s an issue he’s lobbying to address. It may be one way of shifting many patients away from opioids.

“Opioids don’t work and they kill people,” he said. “We need options.”