--> BIOFEEDBACK
In biofeedback, machines monitor changes in physical and mental states and provide information so that the patient can control body functions using such techniques as breathing and relaxation, meditation and visualisation therapy. Although many of the internal workings of our body are not under our conscious control, through biofeedback it is possible to learn to influence them. Thus blood pressure, skin temperature, digestion and muscular tension can all be controlled. |  The early pioneers in biofeedback and relaxation demonstrated that people could influence their own muscular reaction or heart rate, just by directing their attention to parts of it in sequence. biofeedback even had measurable effects on brain wave activity, blood pressure and electrical activity on the skin.3
Braud had been toying with his own studies on extrasensory perception. One of his students who practiced hypnosis agreed to participate in a study in which Braud attempted to transmit his thoughts. Some amazing transferences had gone on. |  NeXus-10 biofeedback system www.stens-biofeedback.com (800) 257-8367
Ondamed biofeedback System www.ondamed.net (800) 807-7864
Quantum Xxroid Consciousness Interface www.qxci.biz (888) 830-3222
Q2 Energy System www.futurewatertoday.com (800) 827-0762 Tools for Wellness www.toolsforwellness.com (800) 456-9887 Bodymath www.bodymath.com (800) 449-3022
Intuition for Health and Healing www.drjudithorloff.com
4. CHECK YOUR BODY PH.
Diet is a huge component, as are negative emotions, when balancing your body's pH.
Natural Cures www.naturalcures.com
Phion Nutrition www.ph-ion. |  But is this sufficient criteria toward determining whether a treatment has been successful?
In biofeedback, a notion of normality is applied to the patient rather than allowing the system to normalize through a natural evolutionary process of therapy. It is the therapist's idea of normality. It is taking a piece or fragment of our psyche and treating it as if that were the be-all and end-all of the matter. Imagine that you are hooked up to an EEG machine and that you try through visualization, such as that in biofeedback, to change your brain waves to so-called normal. |  Using thermal control, a biofeedback technique, people may be able to control migraines by raising their finger temperatures with a digital-temperature device. This appears to work by increasing blood flow, which is decreased by nervous tension. Another biofeedback technique places sensors on the temples, over the temporal arteries. People learn to diminish their migraines by changing their pulse rates.
PART SIX
What You Can Do: Protocols for Heart and Brain Health
First, a word of caution. | | Whether asthma can be helped using biofeedback is unclear, but it has certainly been proved that blood pressure can be reduced without taking drugs by using biofeedback machines.
B10RHYTHMS
Three internal body clocks or cycles are thought to control physical, emotional and intellectual ups and downs. It is believed that by understanding the relationship between the pattern of bio-rhythms and our pattern of behaviour we can chart our lives, thus being able to recognise difficult days and make the most of favourable days. | | The early pioneers in biofeedback and relaxation demonstrated that people could influence their own muscular reaction or heart rate, just by directing their attention to parts of it in sequence. biofeedback even had measurable effects on brain wave activity, blood pressure and electrical activity on the skin.3
Braud had been toying with his own studies on extrasensory perception. One of his students who practiced hypnosis agreed to participate in a study in which Braud attempted to transmit his thoughts. Some amazing transferences had gone on. |  Biofeedback puts the emphasis back on training, rather than the 'miracle pill' or surgery."52
Against this backdrop, Cousins's sudden arrival on the scene looked like a lifeline to many in the medical profession. Here was a patient interested in exploring holistic alternatives to the mainstream, but who told the mainstream medical profession that he wanted to ally with rather than fight them. He made a point of praising his own physician as an open-minded man who was willing to work with him, and implied that partnerships of the sort he had experienced might be ideal for many patients. |  Raided a church at gunpoint, confiscating biofeedback machines and charging that they were "practicing medicine" by counseling church members on issues like depression.
Openly allows corrupt, "on the take" experts to vote on new drug approvals, even when those experts are taking money from the same companies impacted by their votes.
Refuses to legalize stevia, the safe, natural herbal sweetener that's used virtually everywhere else in the world. The agenda? Protect the profits of aspartame and other chemical sweeteners. |  Psychological counseling and a variety of relaxation techniques including biofeedback, yoga, tai chi, Qi gong, and meditation can be helpful aspects of the treatment plan for anyone with past or present stress or depression.
In the last few years, there has been a lot of public health information available on the importance of avoiding alcohol while pregnant, but when it comes to the influence of alcohol consumption on female fertility, mild to moderate alcohol use has not been well studied. It seems, however, that alcohol does reduce conception rates with a dose-related connection. |  The 1963 Church of Scientology raid
In the early 1960s, the FDA got word of something it didn't like: The Church of Scientology was helping its members overcome mental problems with the use of a simple biofeedback device called the E-meter. With the market for psychotropic drugs so consistently profitable, and with Scientology gaining momentum in helping millions of people overcome severe emotional and mental problems, this E-meter had to be taken out of play… and fast!
To do so, the FDA filed a "libel of information" with a U.S. District Court, after which Judge William B. | | Relaxation techniques such as biofeedback, progressive muscular relaxation, meditation, and warm baths can help sedate some people. Soothing music may also reduce anxiety and stress. One study showed that after listening to music while trying to go to sleep, the level of sleepiness was significantly increased and the time to sleep onset was much lower. The music became more effective each night of continued use.187
Some studies of insomnia in postmenopausal women demonstrate that HRT significantly improves sleep quality, shortens sleep onset, and reduces nighttime restlessness and awakenings. | | After two months of biofeedback treatments, sufferers of menstrual cramps had dramatic declines in the severity and duration of their symptoms as well as a decline in the amount of medication they were taking. Meditation, visualization, and relaxation techniques are used by many women both as a primary form of pain management and also in combination with other therapies. My advice would be to seek the advice of a trained person to help you learn which method may be most appropriate and effective for you. | | Relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, biofeedback, meditation, yoga, progressive muscle relaxation, and hypnosis have all been shown to have some value in lowering blood pressure.43 Many recent studies on various stress reduction techniques have also shown improvement in blood pressure and other meas-
PREVENTION
Prevention of Heart Disease
• Get regular aerobic exercise for 30 minutes, 5-7 days per week.
• Increase fish, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, olive oil, and nuts and seeds intake.
• Eat lean meats and poultry without the skin. | | Techniques such as deep-breathing exercises, biofeedback, transcendental meditation, yoga, progressive muscle relaxation, and hypnosis have all been shown to reduce stress and lower blood pressure.377 The antihypertensive effect of these techniques is not dramatic. However, they constitute an important factor in a holistic program to lower blood pressure and treat and prevent heart disease. | | This includes a biofeedback machine, acupuncture needles, a cup of herbal tea, massage oil, a glass of vegetable juice or even a bottle of water.
"...if a person decides to produce and sell raw vegetable juice for use in juice therapy to promote optimal health... [and] if the juice therapy is intended for use as part of a disease treatment regimen instead of for the general wellness, the vegetable juice would also be subject to regulation as a drug under the Act. |  There's nowhere to go but to the Self-Help aisle, to I'm Okay, You're Okay, to Hare Krishna, to Transcendental Meditation, to Scientology, to twice-weekly psychotherapy, to Alcoholics Anonymous, AlAnon, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, to biofeedback, to bulimia and anorexia, to generalized anxiety disorder, to social anxiety disorder, to sibling-relational problem—not otherwise specified, to chemical imbalances, to Zoloft and Prozac and Paxil, and to Julie with her depression with a small d. |  This is biofeedback in action. Because it will pay to be accurate in doing this, I recommend you go with the Yamax 701 pedometer, which has undergone the most testing and standardization. It is available over the Internet. Set the pedometer to give you two measures: the number of steps you take and the number of feet you walk during your day. Wear it on a belt on your waist, just above the middle of a leg. Each day, record the number of steps and the distance, and reset the pedometer. Chart your daily activity for about a week. | | These years saw an exponential growth of interest in meditation, acupuncture (recently introduced from China as one legacy of then-President Nixon's diplomatic efforts), jogging, herbal treatments, biofeedback, and more. Such treatments were widely seen as gentle, effective therapies, but also as sources of patient empowerment that could ultimately have a transforming effect on the doctor-patient relationship and hence on medicine as a whole. | | This form of biofeedback may thus be within your reach to try at home, whereas just a few years ago only a handful of specialists could have afforded it. And besides reducing overbreathing and stress, my colleague Dr. Paul Lehrer tells me that use of a method similar to Freeze-Framer was effective in reducing pain and improving function in FM patients.
Freeze-Framer gives you an overall look at how well your breathing is linked to your heart rate. In addition to the display of your heart rate over time, it gives you an accumulated coherence score. | | Relax as Joanna Spilman is doing while watching [the] monitor of a biofeedback machine enabling her to see and hear tension levels in her body. The band around her head picks up the electrical nerve activity on the frontalis muscle (a bandlike muscle running across the forehead). Electrical energy is measured with sensitive instruments then 'feedback' to the feedback device so the person can see when his frontalis is relaxed or tense. With practice, he or she can learn the 'feeling of relaxation' and promote the state at will." © Bettmann/Corbis to red, indicating maximum tension. | | They used biofeedback to alert subjects to the state of their blood pressure levels, and all changes in a downward direction were reinforced with a flashing light, a sound, and attractive slides flashed on the screen (including reminders of the amount of money the subjects were earning for participating in the study). In the end, six out of seven subjects who went through this proto-
Herbert Benson, M.D., photograph taken in the summer of 1972, when he was first actively developing the concept of the Relaxation Response.
Courtesy of the Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. | | That is to say, perhaps it was possible to think of yogis as super biofeedback self-regulators. Not only could they take the processes of autonomic regulation much further than normal Western patients, but they didn't need machines. |  Biofeedback, stress reduction, and meditation have been shown to reduce a hormone that stimulates many of the physiological processes that can aggravate or contribute to PCOS. Depression frequently accompanies PCOS, perhaps because good mood is one of the serious casualties of hormone imbalances. Consider meditation or any other stress-reducing technique as well as exercise, which elevates mood, as important natural components of any treatment plan for PCOS. weight. On the other hand, it's also associated with a higher incidence of nausea, vomiting, and other gastrointestinal disturbance. |  The body's own biofeedback system always works—it never lies. The muscles will respond to a particular stimulation either with weakness or with strength, so long as the test is conducted properly. If even a so-called "health food" contains something that your body cannot process or digest properly, this feedback system will immediately inform you about it, simply by receiving the appropriate messages from your body cells. A fearful thought, disruptive noise from the street, or the picture on the television news of a killed person is transmitted to your body cells, too. |  In this latter category are biofeedback, hypnosis, guided imagery, relaxation techniques, "lifestyle diet," and vitamin therapy, which, together accounted for less than 10% of total visits to alternative medical practitioners.
Four in ten of these treatments were disclosed to physicians (though we are as always skeptical of such self-reported data), a rate which did not change from 1990. Extrapolation to the U.S. population suggests that there were 629 million visits to alternative medical practitioners, compared with 427 million in 1990. | | Common mind-body treatments include relaxation, meditation, imagery, hypnosis, and biofeedback.25
We might assume that psychological problems, such as those reviewed in the previous chapter, are amenable to such therapies. These problems are, after all, all in one's head. Indeed, mind-body treatments have shown some effectiveness in treating psychological problems. So have mind-body therapies been effective in the relief of pain. Once again, we might (incorrectly) dismiss or minimize these claims, given the subjective nature of pain. |  Using direct biofeedback, the scenar identifies and works to remove energy blockages in the body. The device has been widely used in Russia since the 1980s but remained a secret until perestroika. It is starting to be used in the West, and appears to be quite effective for improving many disorders. An advanced version of the scenar is now available as the Tennant Biomodulator.
VIBRATIONAL ENERGY MEDICINE
Homeopathy is energy medicine. It is based on the principle of "like curing like. | |
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