Massage and application of liniments to painful areas in the body relieves pain due to

Many people have learned from practical experience that rubbing or shaking an injured area decreases the pain due to the injury. The relief may be due to the simultaneous activation of innocuous cutaneous mechanoreceptors whose afferents emit collaterals that terminate in the dorsal horn. The activity of these cutaneous mechanosensitive afferents may reduce the responsiveness of dorsal horn neurons to their input from nociceptive afferent terminals. This is called the gate-control mechanism of pain modulation and it serves as the rationale behind the use of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) for pain relief. This method uses electrodes to activate Aa and Ab fibers in the vicinity of the injury.