TENS stands for transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation and according to the Cleveland clinic uses low-voltage electric currents to block or change your perception of pain.2 You can think of TENS therapy as bombarding your nerve endings with electricity, blocking the pain signals to the brain. It’s like you when you have a crying baby that you want to stop crying, and you use the scare tactic. You basically scream at the baby, scare it to stop crying.
Microcurrent therapy, as opposed to blasting your body with high voltage to block your pain signals, uses microamps which are a thousand times smaller than the milliamps TENS therapy uses. It just so happens that the small current used in microcurrent therapy matches the current naturally found in our bodies, and therefore can encourage natural healing of the body and reduce your pain. In the crying baby analogy, you would be trying to communicate with the baby at their level to get it to stop crying, by offering love, empathy and understanding.