Neural Therapy

Neural therapy is a German technique involving the injection of local anesthetics into scars, based on the theory that scars can produce long-standing pain and malfunction. Scar tissue can have an electric charge of up to 1.5 volts difference to the rest of the body. This abnormal electrical signaling disturbs the nervous system as a whole, causing pain, sometimes at distant sites. So if you have continuing pain since an operation, local anaesthetic injection may help.

How does neural therapy work?

It is not really known, but local anaesthetic has a beneficial effect on the nerve endings in the skin that register chronic pain, by reducing inflammatory chemicals, and can often break a self perpetuating pain cycle. Sometimes one treatment will resolve the pain problem for good. More often, only a partial improvement follows each treatment. Three to six treatments is average. The period of pain relief usually doubles each time.

Neural therapy is widely used in Europe, the Soviet Union, and South America but is not well known here as much of the research is only reported in German and in old journals. Modern research is difficult and expensive, and there is no research money for old drugs like local anaesthetics. Also neural therapy does not lend itself to a double-blind study. Each patient with pain needs to be treated in a different way with careful history taking and appropriate injections.