PainPod

From £89, painpod.co.uk

Pain’s not cool. To cope with it, many off us simply pop a painkiller or two, but that’s really not cool either. Thankfully the PainPod, the self-styled ‘physiotherapy in your pocket’, is here to save the day.

It’s a collection of contraptions – a PainPod Mi (£89), PainPod 3 (£319), plus extra applications for hands and feet – that uses the body’s ‘bioelectrical system’ to manage pain. Like a more intuitive TENS machine (that blocks out messages of pain from reaching your brain), which also claims to speed-up recovery, too.

What does that really mean? It means you stick some little pads to the area of concern and allow yourself to have what feels like mild electric shocks, or pulses, applied to it. It’s much more relaxing than it sounds, especially the 15-minute booster massage for immediate pain relief.

The PainPod 3 has 12 treatments and 20 intensity settings and even ‘acupuncture’ (which targets both joint and muscle pain). The PainPod Mi is tiny, ultra-lightweight and wearable all day, with a 10-hour micro-current painless treatment, especially useful for secretly treating injury in an office environment.

For some, this could be a drug-free game-changer.