Biofeedback teaches Fibromyalgia sufferers how to manage their chronic pain. Biofeedback, used as a Fibromyalgia Treatment, is a technique in which sufferers are trained to find ways to improve their own health. Learn more about how Biofeedback can help FIBROMYALGIA sufferers, it is valuable fibromyalgia treatment for stiffness and pain management.What is Biofeedback – A Fibromyalgia Treatment for Pain?
Biofeedback is a treatment technique in which people are trained to improve their health by using signals from their own bodies. Physical therapists use biofeedback to help stroke victims regain movement in paralyzed muscles. Psychologists use it to help tense, anxious clients learn to relax. Many specialists use Biofeedback as a fibromyalgia treatment to help patients cope with their pain.
Biofeedback is a treatment technique in which people are trained to improve their health by using signals from their own bodies. Physical therapists use biofeedback to help stroke victims regain movement in paralyzed muscles. Psychologists use it to help tense, anxious clients learn to relax. Many specialists use Biofeedback as a fibromyalgia treatment to help patients cope with their pain.
Chances are you have used biofeedback yourself. You have used it if you have taken your temperature or stepped on a scale. The thermometer tells you whether you’re running a fever, the scale whether you’ve gained weight. Both devices “feed back” information about your body’s condition. Armed with this information, you can take steps you have learned to improve your Fibromyalgia symptoms. When you are running a fever, you go to bed and drink plenty of fluids. When you gain weight, you resolve to eat less and sometimes you do.
Clinicians reply on complicated biofeedback machines in somewhat the same way that you rely on your scale or thermometer. Their machines can detect a person’s internal bodily functions with far greater sensitivity and precision than a person can alone. This information may be valuable. Both patients and therapists use it to gauge and direct the progress of treatment.
For patients with fibromyalgia, the biofeedback machine acts as a kind of sixth sense which allows them to “see” or “hear” activity inside their bodies. One commonly used type of machine, for example, picks up electrical signals in the muscles. It translates these signals into a form that patients can detect: It triggers a flashing light bulb, perhaps, or activates a beeper every time muscles grow more tense. If patients want to relax tense muscles, they try to slow down the flashing or beeping.
Like a pitcher learning to throw a ball across a home plate, the biofeedback trainee, in an attempt to improve a skill, monitors the performance. When a pitch is off the mark, the ballplayer adjusts the delivery so that he performs better the next time he tries. When the light flashes or the beeper beeps too often, the biofeedback trainee makes internal adjustments which alter the signals. The biofeedback therapist acts as a coach, standing at the sidelines setting goals and limits on what to expect, giving hints on how to improve one’s performance.
The word “biofeedback” was coined in the late 1960′s to describe laboratory procedures then being used to train experimental research subjects to alter brain activity, blood pressure, heart rate, and other bodily functions that normally are not controlled voluntarily. At the time, many scientists looked forward to the day when biofeedback would give us a major degree of control over our bodies. They thought, for instance, that we might be able to “will” ourselves to be more creative by changing the patterns of our brainwaves. Some believed that biofeedback would one day make it possible to do away with drug treatments that often cause uncomfortable side effects in patients with high blood pressure and other serious conditions.
Today, research has demonstrated that biofeedback can help Fibromyalgia patients, as a fibromyalgia treatment, and with the treatment of many diseases and painful conditions. It has shown that we have more control over so-called involuntary bodily function than we once though possible. But it has also shown that nature limits the extent of such control. Scientists are now trying to determine just how much voluntary control we can exert.
In the next section we explore how Biofeedback works for Fibromyalgia sufferers as a Fibromyalgia Treatment.