Electrother-apy a Valuable Adjunct
No attempt will be made here to go into detail regarding the various modalities and apparatuses and the technique of electrotherapy, for such treatment is distinctly not for home use. Mention has already been made of the small “violet-ray” generators found in many homes and commonly sold in drug stores and elsewhere. So far as the use of these goes, they rightly belong in the field of electrotherapy rather than in that of phototherapy, under which they were mentioned: for the body does receive a small amount of “high-frequency** current from them. But they have no real therapeutic value. Elec¬trotherapy proper cannot be toyed with; no effective electro¬therapy appliance is a toy or plaything in any sense of the term. Such appliances can be utilized successfully only when the properties of electricity—physical and physiological—are understood. And there is still much to be learned regarding the nature of this great force.
Electricity may be generated from different sources and modified by different influences; but all its forms, as we know them, are essentially different manifestations of the same force. These different manifestations, however, are capable of pro¬ducing different effects upon the body, so a knowledge of their particular influence upon the cells is necessary to the electro-therapeutist, as well as knowledge of the physics of electricity.