In the present study 123 patients with chronic pain, consecutively referred for symptomatic pain treatment, were given peripheral conditioning stimulation as an analgesic measure and were followed for 2 years or till they terminated the treatment. The stimulation was either conventional transcutaneous nerve stimulation (TNS) [35] of mainly cutaneous afferents with high frequency (10-100 Hz) or acupuncture-like TNS [11] where muscle nerves are activated at a low repetition rate (1-4 Hz) with small trains of stimuli. The follow-up showed that 55, 41 and 31% of the patients continued the treatment after 3, 12 and 24 months, respectively. About 30% of the patients had to use acupuncture-like TNS to get useful analgesia, defined as a desire of the patient to continue stimulation treatment. Three-quarters of the successfully relieved patients reported more than 50% pain relief as measured from visual analogue scales and half of these reported an increased social activity and a decrease of analgesic drug intake by more than 50%. Psychogenic and visceral pains were less suitable for TNS treatment. It is concluded that peripheral conditioning stimulation is a valuable therapy in cases of chronic pain and that both conventional and acupuncture-like TNS should be tried before considering implantable devices or destructive surgery.

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Psychiatric patients (n = 107) and normal subjects (n = 100) were exposed to seven newly composed pieces of music orchestrated for a small symphony orchestra. The patients were divided into seven subgroups: schizophrenic, depressive and manic psychosis; obsessive, depressive, anxiety and hysterical neurosis. All subjects rated the music on semantic differential scales describing three factors of emotional experience: tension-relaxation, gaiety-gloom and attraction-repulsion. The ratings by patients in the different groups were compared with those by the normal subjects. Expressiveness in music was found to be communicated to patients in the same relative way as to normals. However, in the various diagnostic groups, several marked differences in experience were demonstrated. The main findings were that schizophrenic psychotics experienced the music as more attractive, while depressive and anxiety neurotics experienced it as less attractive, than normals. Depressive and manic psychotics experienced the music as less gay. Obsessive neurotics seem to be more sensitive to tension than normals.

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