User:Catherinesnyberg/sandbox

1. The context of this Wiki edit: To the article ‘Biofeedback’, there is a subsection  ‘Applications’, and further subsection  ‘Pain’  : under which there are a couple sections on different pain for which biofeedback is used. To that area I will be adding a paragraph called Chronic Back Pain. I have cited an article that clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of EMG Biofeedback to not only be as effective as CBT six months after treatment, but also reduces the debilitating effects of chronic back pain by approximately half.

Chronic back pain
Newton-John, Spense, and Schotte (1994) compared the effectiveness of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and Electromyographic Biofeedback (EMG-Biofeedback) for 44 participants with chronic low back pain. Newton-John et al. (1994) split the participants into two groups, then measured the intensity of pain, the participants’ perceived disability, and depression before treatment, after treatment and again six months later. Newton-John et al.(1994) found no significant differences between the group which received CBT and the group which received EMG-Biofeedback. This seems to indicate that biofeedback is as effective as CBT in chronic low back pain. Comparing the results of the groups before treatment and after treatment, indicates that EMG-Biofeedback reduced pain, disability, and depression as much as by half.

2. The context of this edit: There is a major section called History. After that I would like to add a major section called:

The future of biofeedback
Christopher deCharms (of Omneuron in San Francisco) in conjunction with Stanford University School of Medicine has developed a real-time fMRI for the purpose of training the brain to activate its own endogenous opiates. Dr. deCharms believes this will revolutionize the treatment of chronic pain. The patient can control his own pain by visually looking at his rtfMRI, watching his own reactions in real time, and then blocking the pathways causing pain. deCharms mentions that clinical trials with rtfMRI  is measuring a 44 to 64 percent decrease in chronic pain. With 8 participants in the study, deCharms et al.(2005) demonstrated that subjects can control the pain of heat stimulus, by visually observing in real time their brain activity. The subjects were instructed to use techniques such as changing the focus of their attention to the pain, and changing the emotional value of the pain. Then while viewing their own fMRI in real time the subjects could observe the effect of their thoughts on the part of the brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). When the subject ‘controlled the pain’ the virtual flame on the fMRI got dimmer. Results from this study indicate two things: 1. That subjects can learn to voluntarily control brain activity in a specific region of the brain, and 2. There is a significant increase in the ability of healthy subjects to control their pain with repeated training. This study was then repeated with 8 patients with chronic intractable pain. The results showed that these patients were successful in reducing their pain rating by 64% (using the McGill Pain Questionairre). The authors state that this is not yet a ‘treatment’, but still under serious investigation.