What Is Biofeedback And When Is It Used For Pain?
August 18, 2008
Question: What Is Biofeedback And When Is It Used To Relieve Pain?
Answer: In the chronic pain patient, we often need many
different tools to treat the patient. Biofeedback is one of these tools
that helps the patient to modulate their pain or tune it down.
Pain is often associated with anxiety, and anxiety can certainly be
managed with biofeedback. There are various forms of biofeedback.
Biofeedback can be measuring muscle tension; it can measure skin
temperature; it can measure sweating; or the most sophisticated forms of
biofeedback now measure brainwaves that are associated with the pain.
This type of biofeedback is called brainwave biofeedback or EEG
biofeedback, for electro-encephalography or EEG.
Brainwave biofeedback has the advantage of actually allowing the
technologist to look at what's going on in the patient's brain in terms
of the impact pain has. By teaching the patient through brainwave
biofeedback to minimize the brainwaves that are associated with their
pain, the patient can learn to tune down their pain. The patient can
also learn when a situation is likely to provoke the pain without
physically provoking it, but by emotionally provoking it. And when the
patient, through biofeedback, learns when pain is emotionally provoked,
they can actually use the tool that they learned in biofeedback to tune
down the situation and tune down the pain.
Source: ABC News
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