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Computer Revolution Brings New Uses for Biofeedback Treatment:
From the labs of NASA and the microcomputer industry come technologies that promise to add a new tool to the medical kit. Biofeedback, long a recognized treatment for stress-related back pain, headache and hypertension, is now being used to treat a broader spectrum of disorders, says Dr. Dan Chartier of Life Quality Resources of Raleigh. Medical problems such as back pain caused by muscle contraction, asthma, incontinence, recovery from head injury and stroke, attention deficit disorder (ADD), and alcoholism and substance abuse can all be treated with types of biofeedback. Biofeedback also has a history as an adjunctive treatment in psychotherapy for disorders such as anxiety and depression.
“Biofeedback has been around for a long time,” says Dr. Chartier. “It has its roots in the space exploration program. NASA developed mechanisms of monitoring and feeding back information about the astronauts’ physical processes when they were orbiting the earth. Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, medical applications for biofeedback were found in treating headaches, incontinence, hypertension, muscle-contraction pain, and other stress-related symptoms. With the recent advent of faster personal computers it is now possible to bring innovative biofeedback techniques into the clinical realm, including treatment for brain injury and nerurologically based disorders.”
Dr. Chartier, a University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University trained psychologist, works with other professionals to bring biofeedback to patients. He first became interested in biological electronics during his clinical training. “After completing my degree, I began incorporating more biofeedback training into the psychotherapy work that I did with patients suffering from anxiety and depression. Now we’re finding that biofeedback provides another option for addressing the symptoms of patients referred to us medically.”
Gaining Control
Biofeedback trains patients to improve their health by using signals from their own bodies to teach them to control normally unconscious body functions. One commonly used monitoring system, for example, picks up electrical signals from the muscles. It translates these signals into a form that patients can detect, such as a light that flashes or a beeper that sounds every time a muscle grows more tense.
“One way to think about biofeedback is that we are adding another loop to your nervous system,” explains Dr. Chartier. If patients want to relax tense muscles, they focus on slowing down the flashing or beeping. The biofeedback specialist coaches the patient on how to make conscious, internal adjustments when the feedback shows that there is too much muscle tension.
The goal in this type of training is to eventually teach the person to achieve the desired physical results without the electronic feedback. “Once you have the skill, you don’t need the equipment. You can be sitting in a meeting and notice that you are starting to get tense by a twinge in your jaw. You learn how to let it go and keep going with your meeting and not end up with a headache”, says Dr. Chartier.
Migraine and tension headaches have proven to be especially tractable with biofeedback therapy. Dr. Chartier says that biofeedback is now considered the treatment of choice in cases where exhaustive medical testing is unable to find a clear organic cause, and especially where stress seems to be the activator. Dr. Seymour Diamond, of the Diamond Headache Clinic in Chicago, has made the statement that “biofeedback is the only known effective non-pharmacological treatment for headaches.”
Controlling brain waves
Within the field of biofeedback, there is a growing interest in neurofeedback – learning to control brain waves. In neurofeedback, Dr. Chartier uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) to monitor brain waves, similar to the way that muscle contractions are measured. A computer relays the signals to the patient in the form of visual or sound cues, allowing the patient to become aware of which types of brain waves are active.
Disorders that have been relieved with neurofeedback at Medical Biofeedback Services [Life Quality Resources] include Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) in adults and children. “There are brain-linked patterns in patients with ADD that are significantly different from normal patterns," Dr. Chartier says. “When people with ADD focus on a task they will actually increase their slow-wave brain activity. The non-attention-disordered person will show a faster brain wave when challenged to concentrate.”
Using EEG-supplied information, ADD patients (adults and children) learn to apply the appropriate patterns of brain wave activity to a task. While medications treat only the symptoms of ADD, neurofeedback seems to have a broader impact. “One of our patients-a child with ADD-responded with a significant increase in his IQ,” Dr. Chartier notes. “His IQ which had measured consistently over a number of years at 89, went to 112.”
Other clinicians around the country are reporting similar case results. “We are not claiming that we are making these children smarter.” Dr. Chartier says, “But they do respond to tests better when they have better control over their attention.”
Born in the technological revolution of the 1960s biofeedback continues to grow and develop as a potential mainstream medical technology in this decade of the brain. Whether helping patients reduce headaches or hypertension, women regain bladder control, attention-disordered individuals to focus, or brain-injured patients and alcoholics to change their brain waves, biofeedback is a medical technology with much to offer. [1]
[1] Chartier, Dan, “Computer Revolution brings New Uses for Biofeedback Treatment,” Health and Healing in the Triangle.
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