Neurotherapy is medical treatment that implements systemic targeted delivery of an energy stimulus or chemical agents to a specific neurological zone in the body to alter neuronal activity and stimulate neuroplasticity in a way that develops (or balances) a nervous system in order to treat different diseases, restore and/or to improve patients' physical strength, cognitive functions, and overall health.
While neurotherapy may have a broader meaning, its modern definition focuses exclusively on technological methods that exert an energy-based impact on the development of the balanced nervous system in order to address symptom control and cure several conditions.
Medical devices for neuromodulation exert electrical, magnetic, and/or electromagnetic energy to treat mental and physical health disorders in patients.
Synaptic plasticity, a particular type of neuroplasticity is the ability of the nervous system to modify the intensity of interneuronal relationships (synapses), to establish new ones and to eliminate some.
This property allows the nervous system to modify its structure and functionality in a more or less lasting way and dependent on the events that influence them such as experience or neuromodulation.
[18] Therefore, similar mechanisms of altered neuronal activity may underlie different neuromodulation techniques that use electrical, magnetic, or electromagnetic energy in treatment.
[14] During the mother's intentional actions with her environment, these interchanges provide hints to the fetus's nervous system, binding synaptic activity with relevant stimuli.
[14] This hypothesis posits that the physiological processes of mitochondrial stress induction (affecting neuronal plasticity) and vasodilation, which cooperatively increase microvascular blood flow and tissue oxygenation, are the basis of the natural neurostimulation.
The Egyptians used the Nile catfish (Synodontis batensoda and Malapterurus electricus) to stimulate tissue electrically, according to an interpretation of frescoes in the tomb of the architect Ti at Saqqara, Egypt.
[27] Scientific studies of neuromodulation began in 1745, when German physician De Haen published “a number of cases of spasmodic, paralytic and other nervous affections cured by electricity”.
[28] In 1870, German physicians Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig reported the modulation of brain activity in dogs by electrical stimulation of the motor cortex.