Even at the point where the disregulation status is that far advanced, one may still be able to largely restore good self-regulation with neurofeedback. There is nothing subtle at all about what happens. The person becomes aware within only a handful of sessions that their burdens are being lifted. Sleep improves in first order, and then benefits proliferate all over the landscape. How much better could we do if one had started much earlier, when the disregulation status was not so far advanced and not so deeply embedded?
For this question too we can offer the beginnings of an answer. We now have over fifteen years of history on the children that were involved in the early nineties in our ADHD study. These lives were turned around not only with respect to academic, intellectual, and executive function, but with regard to overall health as well. We now have people who have been migraine-free for over fifteen years as a result of neurofeedback. We cannot take credit for all of that. Nature stands us in good stead here. A well-regulated status is self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. It is as if we were putting a derailed train back on the track.
The health maintenance agenda for all of us must be to assure that we remain on the track of a self-reinforcing self-regulation regime for as long as possible throughout life. Every slide into disregulated status over time should serve as a reminder of the primacy of the self-regulation techniques and technologies in health maintenance.
For the time being, the entire Medical Model is on a war-footing against the self-regulation model. This follows quite simply from the fact that the chief adversary in medical research is the vaunted placebo, which, insofar as its effects are "real, is nothing more than self-regulation dressed up as the official null response. As we know, it is difficult to shift paradigm from within. All the reinforcers within medicine augur for a perpetuation of the current dysfunctional status. The Self-Regulation Imperative will have to assert itself without sponsorship by the elites.
Most of our clients over the years have had to make a mental cost-benefit analysis for their own situation, because the vast majority of them paid out of pocket. As their training progressed, that implicit calculation was refined. The most accessible measure of our overall success is therefore to be found in our retention rate. Years ago, rheumatologist Xavier Caro observed the remarkable compliance among his fibromyalgia patients when it came to neurofeedback using our protocols. In the CRI-Help addictions study, improved retention with respect to controls was the first obvious observable. The attrition rate was cut in half among the participants. And now at Camp Pendleton, the notably treatment-adverse active-duty servicemen are showing up consistently for neurofeedback. We are clearly moving beyond symptom suppression to address the core issue of systemic disregulation. There is, quite simply, no viable alternative to the reliance upon the emerging neuromodulation technologies.
Sources:
Civilization's Cost: The Decline and Fall of Human Health, Science, 324, p 588, 1 May 2009
Treatment of recurrent abdominal pain: components analysis of four treatment protocols. P.A. Humphreys and R.N. Gevirtz, Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology & Nutrition, 31(1), pp 47-51, July 2000.
Reprinted from eeginfo
