American Pain Society's 27th Annual Scientific Meeting (May 8 – 10, 2008): Biofeedback: Past, Present and Future

Biofeedback has been used for several decades to train people to regulate global measures of brain function, such as electroencephalogram (EEG), and global measures of autonomic arousal such as heart rate, breathing rate, skin conductance, and electromyogram (EMG). Dr. Gatchel will provide a brief overview of the early clinical research in this area, and also point out some of “the lessons from the past” to avoid in order to make the new resurgence in biofeedback more theoretically-driven and evidence-based. This will then lead to the discussion that attaining control over specific neural processes is the primary goal of neuropharmacology and neurostimulation; it is also a critical objective of biological psychiatry and psychology. Training people to modulate specific neural processes has the potential to enable them to have greater control over the resulting behavior, cognition, or associated disease. Dr. Robinson will discuss the current research and clinical applications of EEG feedback. Dr. Mackey will present recent data demonstrating the use of real time fMRI to allow subjects and patients to directly control specific regions of their brain with resulting changes in pain perception.