heat only for Pain

Lower back pain is one of the most common and most expensive impairments costing time and expense in the work force today. With the effects on cognitive skills and addictive side effects of opioids and other prescription pain killers, there has been increasing interest in alternative medical treatments to relieve pain. Two of these that are commonly used are heat and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS). In the present investigation, there are two objectives 1) to determine if Tens needs to be continuous or can be intermittent and still achieve pain relief and 2) To see how long pain relief lasts after 4 hours of application of tens, heat or both. There will be seventy-five subjects with chronic back pain divided into 6 groups randomly; 15 subjects per group. The intervention will be either TENS alone, Heat alone or Tens plus heat or a control group.