Electric Relief

Breaking through chronic nerve pain with Calmare Scrambler Therapy

BY KRYSTEN GODFREY MADDOCKS / ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN R. GOODWIN

Cindy Morin, 71, of Berlin, suffers from idiopathic bilateral neuropathy — a painful, burning sensation that starts in both of her feet and travels up through her ankles. Over the past 15 years, health care providers haven’t been able to determine why she experiences it or how to cure it. She’s tried everything from orthotics and pain medication to numb the pain — with no success, until recently.

In July, after undergoing several days of Calmare Scrambler Therapy at Chronic Pain Centers of New England in Plymouth, Morin, for the first time, feels she’s found a treatment that might work. Just days after receiving her first course of scrambler therapy, she says she feels 90% better.

“I’m more energetic. I can go up and down the stairs a lot easier,” she says. “It’s our 50th anniversary in October, and I’m hoping this treatment has now afforded me the ability to walk around Washington, D.C., and do things that we should be able to do — and do it with a lot of fun and vigor.”

Calmare Pain Treatment Therapy, also known as scrambler therapy, is a noninvasive and non-pharmaceutical treatment for chronic pain sufferers developed by Italian Professor Giuseppe Marineo, a researcher and the founder and manager of Delta Research & Development, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2009. A review paper co-authored by two Johns Hopkins pain experts suggests this type of therapy can offer relief for approximately 80% to 90% of patients with chronic pain. Chronic Pain Centers of New England is the only clinic in New Hampshire that offers scrambler therapy.

For Morin, local access to scrambler therapy has provided hope for a pain-free life.

“I’m so ready to tell friends who have sciatica or other things about it,” she says. “I haven’t yet because I don’t want to jinx it or give them false hope.”

How it Works

Using an MC-5A Calmare Scrambler Therapy device, patients receive rapidly changing electrical impulses that send a “non-pain” message along the same pain fibers that send the “pain” message to their brains, according to Kelley Small, a treatment coordinator and co-owner of the Chronic Pain Centers of New England, along with business manager Amos Shinkle, and medical officer and chiropractor, Dr. Todd Mosenthal.

Small, who is not a clinician, discovered scrambler therapy when she was looking for an alternative treatment to help her husband, Steven Small, find relief after spinal fusion surgery in 2016 left him in chronic pain. Their personal journey, from discovering the therapy to witnessing its transformative effects on Steven, inspired the couple to bring scrambler therapy to New Hampshire.

“We flew to Boise, Idaho, last May for the three-day trial, where Steven had 24 hours of relief after the first day,” she says. “We knew he would be a candidate for the full 10 days of therapy. In July 2023, Steven went back to Idaho for 12 days and came home a new man.”

The couple was encouraged the treatments provided relief, but travel proved inconvenient and expensive. So Kelley thought, Why not bring the therapy here?

“I could have taken this machine, bought it, and just used it on my husband,” she says. “But I told my husband it would be the most selfish thing we could possibly do by not letting others experience what we’ve experienced. So that’s why we decided to do this.”

Bringing Pain Management Closer to Home

Earlier this spring, Kelley opened up her business. The first course of treatment requires patients to visit the clinic for an hour over three days. If it appears to work for them, they continue the complete 10-day treatment. While it’s not covered by insurance, a patient’s initial three-day trial costs $89 each day, and the 10-day treatment, which patients must attend for a minimum of five days, costs $175 per session. Once patients achieve success with the first course of treatments, they may remain pain-free for weeks or months and only need to receive one to three “booster” sessions to remain that way. A good patient response after one session usually indicates whether Calmare treatment will work for that individual, Kelley says.

The clinic uses scrambler therapy to focus on treating a variety of chronic pain conditions, including neuropathy, sciatica, and Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). Scrambler therapy does not treat arthritis or muscular pain.

Kelley teamed up with Dr. Todd Mosenthal, a Dartmouth-educated chiropractor with almost 30 years of experience, whose own back injury disrupted his dream of attending medical school and continuing his family’s legacy.

While the medical field has made tremendous progress in the pain care field, chiropractic care and approaches such as scrambler therapy can help people wean off opioids and enjoy a better quality of life, he says.

“The great thing about Calmare is that it doesn’t care if you’re a diabetic or if you have other issues,” he says. “At the end of the day, it boils down to someone having all of these noxious impulses. These neurons that send messages to the brain are not working correctly, and if they’re not working correctly, they imprint the negative.”

Mosenthal explains that scrambler therapy focuses on relieving patients’ peripheral nerve pain. Nerves have receptors that regulate the amount of pain that goes to the brain. Usually, these receptors can handle a lot of pain that comes in and then modulate that pain over time so the brain senses less and less pain. In some cases, he says, the nerves fail to modify or dampen the pain signal coming from the peripheral nerve — and it continues without any causal event.

“It’s like the gate has now been opened. The impulse goes to the brain, and it’s open-ended,” Mosenthal says. “So the question becomes, how do you tamper that signal that says nothing but pain to the brain?

Scrambler therapy focuses on sending an impulse to the brain that can help modify and calm the nervous system. Patients receive impulses near their areas of pain which help “override” the pain impulses, altering — or scrambling — the pain message.

“So that same nerve that was saying pain has now been altered — it’s scrambled — which is how the therapy got that name,” Mosenthal says.

An Alternative to Opioids

The opioid crisis is awful, Kelley says, and it affects people who are hurt to begin with. For many patients, opioids are the first line of treatment, offer little relief and can introduce risk.

Today, Steven Small has weaned off most of his pain medications, which he says produced negative side effects. Before Calmare treatment, Steven remembers attending a pain clinic in New Hampshire where he was offered all kinds of opioids.

Today, the former minister fills in for his pastor when he’s away. In September, he’s looking forward to baptizing his youngest grandson and traveling to Switzerland with Kelley. He also enjoys singing and playing with his grandchildren at Newfound Lake.

“They didn’t know I could swim until I came home from Idaho, when I swam out to the raft and dove in. They said they didn’t know Buba could swim,” Steven says. “It made me sad that they didn’t know me before any of this because they were all born after I had the first surgery.”

Morin, too, says she’s been offered all kinds of medications, which just didn’t work. She also has been told by medical providers she should learn how to live with the pain.

“Because it’s the hardest to diagnose and treat, a lot of times, people just think you’re crazy,” she says. “This scrambler is noninvasive. It doesn’t hurt. It’s worth a try.”