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| Alice in Neuroland - Page 13 |
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"The education I'd received left me with one question: why am I doing this?" says Demos, who's since written Getting Started with Neurofeedback , a practical, neuroscience-based primer he wished he'd had when he began. "One week, clients would say they felt better, and the next week they'd say they were feeling worse. It was pure guesswork. I was moving sensors from place to place, chasing all over the brain." Demos has since taken up a more systematic and technological approach, starting with taking a quantitative EEG (qEEG)--a computerized innovation that reads brain function simultaneously at 21 different electrode sites on the skull and compares them to a database of "normal" brains. Demos uses the subsequent "brain map" to decide where to place his electrodes. Hit-and-miss or not, the miracles kept on coming. Psychologist Ed Hamlin took neurofeedback back to his Pisgah Institute group practice in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1998 and began experimenting. He and a fellow Pisgah partner, psychiatrist Stephen Buie, eventually hit on a protocol that stabilized more than 30 severely manic-depressive clients who'd been repeatedly hospitalized, despite massive doses of anticonvulsant and antipsychotic drugs. Before neurofeedback, Hamlin said, his work with his patients had been pretty much limited to getting them to keep taking their meds, no matter how zombielike they made them feel. At best they stabilized on the drugs at what Hamlin calls "a sort of negative static hum," rating themselves at a zero on a -5 to +5 mood-rating scale. After neurofeedback, the clients reported they'd stabilized at +1, a mildly positive state. "The results are so unrealistically positive that I know we sound like an infomercial sometimes," Hamlin says "Before, we were teaching these clients coping strategies. Now we're actually treating the disorder. We're doing something that directly impacts the neurophysiology of their problem." The results are so universally positive, Hamlin adds, he now considers it "almost negligent" not to treat bipolar patients with neurofeedback. |
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