Faradization

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The practice of utilizing electrical currents to achieve therapeutic benefits involves stimulating muscles or tissues for healing purposes
2. A medical procedure that employs electrical stimulation aims to treat various ailments through the application of electric currents
3. Use of electrical currents applied to the body for medical treatment or muscle stimulation

Etymology: Faradization is named after Michael Faraday, the English chemist and physicist whose experiments in electromagnetic induction in 1831 made it possible to generate the alternating currents used in the treatment. The surgeon and physician Duchenne de Boulogne popularised the technique in France in the 1850s, using induced currents from a coil apparatus to stimulate muscles and nerves in patients with paralysis and other disorders. The word itself is simply Faraday's name with the suffix "-ization," which turns a name into a verb for applying a method, so the term describes the treatment in the same way that "galvanization" describes applying Luigi Galvani's discoveries about electricity and muscle. Faradization was a common term in nineteenth-century medicine, and it was used especially for treatments of muscle wasting and nerve injury. The technique was later largely superseded by other forms of electrotherapy, though the name survives in medical histories and older texts.