What is Biofeedback Therapy?
Biofeedback is a unique treatment that empowers a person to take active steps in changing behaviors, reducing symptoms, and improving their own lives. This in-office therapy will teach you how to pay closer attention to your own body and gives you the tools to make positive health changes and reduce uncomfortable symptoms.
Biofeedback therapy empowers you toward a greater awareness and understanding of your own body, and trains you over a series of treatment sessions to gain better control over the physiological functions that are occurring on a daily basis. Biofeedback is aimed at changing habitual reactions to stress that can cause unpleasant symptoms, pain or disease. Many of our chronic health conditions are aggravated by an imbalanced nervous system.
Stressful events produce strong emotions, which arouse certain physical responses. Many of these responses are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, the network of nerve tissues that helps prepare the body to meet emergencies by “flight or fight.” Unfortunately, many people have simply forgotten how to relax and live their lives in this constantly heightened state.
Biofeedback therapy gives you immediate real-time information regarding your body’s physical responses such as heart rate, skin temperature, perspiration and muscle tension. Using state-of-the-art technology, biofeedback will help you to over time recognize a more relaxed state, and then implement tools toward maintaining that state more consistently throughout the day.
How does Biofeedback Work?
Relaxation is a key component in biofeedback treatment of many disorders. During a series of 45-minute sessions, you will be connected to a machine via non-invasive sensors attached to the fingers and around the abdomen. Metabolic rates will be monitored and seen in real time on a visual screen. Through repeated practice and instruction, you will learn to modify these rates, resulting in improved nervous system balance and a reduction in unpleasant symptoms. Course of therapy varies dependent on individual symptoms and response, but typically may last between six and twelve treatments in the initial series, with many people following up with occasional maintenance sessions in cases of some chronic conditions.
What does Biofeedback Treat?
Biofeedback techniques have been researched and proven to be effective in the treatment of an ever-lengthening list of conditions. These include:
- Migraine headaches and tension headaches
- Chronic back pain, neck pain and other pain disorders
- Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome
- Anxiety, nervous tension and depressive disorders
- IBS and many disorders of the digestive system
- High blood pressure and its opposite, low blood pressure
- Atrial fibrillation and other cardiac arrhythmias
- Raynaud’s disease (a circulatory disorder that causes uncomfortably cold hands)
- Tinnitus and TMJ disorders
- Performance enhancement