Dr Pete Gladwell - clinical specialist physiotherapist in pain management at North Bristol NHS Trust.

Pete’s research identified the benefits that patients report from using TENS devices (electrical stimulators used for pain relief). The findings present some major challenges for researchers working in the area and, we think, throw up some challenges for health research more widely. For example, he found that there was a very poor match between the benefits reported by patients and what researchers have measured in previous research – the implication being that TENS might be shown to be ineffective when in fact we have just measured the wrong things. Similarly, one of the benefits reported was that TENS distracts people from pain… but how do you measure distraction? – as soon as you ask somebody about it, they aren’t distracted any more. The implications of his observations are that health researchers perhaps need to think again at how they measure outcomes to better capture the effects of specific health interventions.