What is rTMS?
What is rTMS? and How does it Work?
The human brain is an unimaginably complex and beautiful thing. As the control centre of the body, its importance in many medical conditions seems obvious, but for years the exact details of how this worked were a mystery. Modern advances in imaging, however, mean that our understanding of the processes involved is now much better, opening up new and exciting treatment options for a range of illnesses.
Conditions such as depression, anxiety, OCD and others have all been linked with altered activity in specific regions of the brain, and fibromyalgia syndrome has recently been added to this list, which is where repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) comes in.
RTMS has been studied for over 25 years, and found to have the fascinating ability to be able to either increase or decrease activity in a targeted brain area, depending on how it is used. This unique attribute means that it has been successfully used to turn up underactive areas (in depression for example), or calm down overactive areas (in anxiety, OCD etc), revolutionising the management of these difficult to treat conditions.
Research suggests that rTMS has the ability to help reduce pain in people suffering with fibromyalgia using these same principles, giving it the potential to offer hope to the millions of people who struggle with this debilitating condition.
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