Microcurrent Therapy as a Therapeutic Modality for Musculoskeletal Pain: A Systematic Review Accelerating the Translation From Clinical Trials to Patient Care.

There is only 1 randomised trial for each pain site and all of them are small: 52 people with knee pain, 40 with shoulder pain, 10 with chronic low back pain. The authors state they could not assess inconsistency or publication bias for this reason, and that they cannot address generalisability. A single reviewer did all the screening, data extraction, risk-of-bias scoring and quality grading. The authors acknowledge this may have produced more errors than independent review by two people. Trials that combined microcurrent therapy with another treatment such as exercise were deliberately excluded, so the review says nothing about how the device performs when it is added to the therapy patients actually receive. The review included no trials comparing microcurrent therapy with any other treatment, so it cannot say whether it works better than anything else. The effect for each pain site, and the split between sham response and true treatment effect, came from a single study each, so a single unusually responsive group could account for the result.

The article text supplied here contains no funding statement and no conflict-of-interest declaration, so who paid for the review cannot be determined from it.

Do not read this as evidence that microcurrent therapy works for musculoskeletal pain in general. Only 4 small randomised trials were found, one for each pain site, and for knee pain 57% of the total improvement also occurred with the sham device, so the specific contribution of the current itself is small.