Alternative therapies and natural remedies news

​This month our resident GP casts her discerning eye over biofeedback…
You may have seen documentaries about holy men in India performing remarkable bodily feats like slowing their heart rate down. Well, biofeedback is the modern day equivalent. It’s the process of learning how to gain control over the automatic functions that happen in your body, the idea being that once you learn how to monitor your body’s reactions, you can learn how to alter them to control symptoms.

At first monitors are used to help you observe processes but the idea of training is to become aware of them without the monitor. Biofeedback is an effective therapy for many conditions, but it is primarily used to treat high blood pressure, headaches, chronic pain and urinary incontinence.

Monitoring your body

The best results I’ve seen have been when biofeedback has been tried for migraines. The few patients I know who have tried it were delighted with the results. While this technique may be more timeconsuming (at least initially) than simply taking analgesic medication, they felt empowered to be in control of their symptoms and not feeling so dependent on medication.

The potential benefit of biofeedback in the treatment of migraine makes sense if we think about the vascular theory of migraine, which is that migraines occur due to an increase in blood flow to the head. If a sufferer can modify the temperature of another body part (such as their hands) through biofeedback, then the blood flow will automatically increase to the hands and decrease to the head. Generally people need about 10 hour long biofeedback sessions to start to see results. It is considered safe and no adverse side effects have been reported.