Migraines and chronic headaches can be detrimental to your family, job, income, and overall well-being. Drugs can be expensive, ineffective, cause unwanted side-effects and are often unnecessary. In many cases, including pregnancy, it is best to treat these ailments without medications. The Brain Clinic offers alternative, non-pharmaceutical treatments such as biofeedback and neurofeedback which are extremely effective for migraines and chronic headaches.
Biofeedback consists of several methods of treatment in which patients learn to control their own physiology in order to improve their physical and psychological health. For example, a patient who is trained to control his/her temperature can aid in alleviating their own headaches, hypertension, anxiety, tinnitus, as well as enhance general relaxation.
Neurofeedback is one method of biofeedback in which a patient can learn to train their brain to help with migraines, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression, traumatic brain injury, and other neurological disorders. Hemoencephalography (HEG) biofeedback is one form of biofeedback which is vey effective for migraine headaches.
Hemoencephalography (HEG) is a new type of biofeedback where the patient learns to train the frontal lobe cerebral blood flow. As shown in the video below, an infrared camera reads the temperature of the blood flow in the frontal lobe beneath the skull. The patient begins watching a movie of his or her choice. If the patient keeps the temperature above a threshold level, the movie continues to play. If the temperature drops in the frontal lobe, then the movie stops. By focusing on a bar graph, the patient can bring up the temperature and the movie will continue. This biofeedback system was originally designed for migraine headache treatment, and has shown promising results.
In a recent study, Carmen (2004) took 100 migraine patients who had tried many treatments, including several medications, with little success. In only 6 HEG sessions, positive results were seen, and over 90 percent of the patients reported significantly positive results, according to their own report.
This video shows a Biofeedback Demonstration produced by The Brain Clinic in New York City.
Biofeedback has been known to be helpful for several decades for a wide-variety of ailments. In the 2002 review by Penzien, Rains and Andrasik, it was noted that even by 1980, there were enough studies to conduct a meta-analysis (Blanchard, Andrasik, Ahles, Teders, & O’Keefe, 1980), which revealed that over the 16 studies, behavioral treatment of migraines showed promise. By 1999, Goslin, Gray, McCrory, Eberlin, Tulsky and Hasselblad indentified 355 articles describing behavioral and physical treatment for migraines, and the 70 controlled studies of behavioral treatments for migraines meeting strict criteria for inclusion in this meta-analysis resulted in reductions for migraines of 32 to 49 percent of people. The treatments included EMG training, relaxation therapy, combined EMG and relaxation, and cognitive-behavior therapy. All were more effective than wait list controls.
Neurofeedback has also been used to treat migraine headaches. Although this research is quite new, it is still very promising (Siniatchkin, Hierundar, Kropp, Khunert, Gerber & Staphani, 2000).
Since these treatments involve cognitive training and not pharmaceuticals, they are especially useful in pregnancy and other situations where medications are unwanted or unnecessary.
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Neurofeedback is $250. per session, a deposit is required for multiple sessions.
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We accept various forms of payment, including Visa, Mastercard.
INSURANCE The testing is covered by many insurance plans that provide out of network benefits.
We will assist you in determining your coverage for the testing, and we will help you get reimbursed.
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Please visit our Fees page for more information about pricing and insurance.
Contact us by phone at 212-268-8900, or by filling out the form below.
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