Patients dealing with chronic pain typically receive continued conventional treatment, but there are some disadvantages primarily due to the unwanted side effects of regular analgesic use. This sparked unending efforts to look for safer pain management techniques, and over the last few years, neurotherapy has become a leading discovery.
Neurotherapy hinges on the observation that a person can manipulate certain autonomic body functions just by being conscious of them. Through instruments that quantify physiological activity like body temperature, heartbeat or muscle activity, a person receives quick and factual feedback as to those functions, allowing them to control the same as a way to modify their mental, emotional and psychological states. After a while, these changes will stay even without the use of monitoring tools.
Neurotherapy is essentially therapy aimed at the brain. It tracks brain waves, generating a signal that enables brain functions to self-regulate.
Over the last decades, it has been demonstrated that with ample training, brain waves can be manipulated. The brain’s bioelectric activity can be influenced through intellectual activity, and the effects can manifest as neurophysiological changes. By understanding the connection between the bioelectric activity of various brain areas and their corresponding emotional, cognitive, pathological or behavioral processes, neurotherapy can make it possible to modify those particular processes.
Neurotherapy has been proven to promote relaxation, attention and creativity, as well as treat or manage a variety of conditions, from epilepsy to depression to chronic pain and more. The psychological elements affecting pain perception can alter the biochemical processes occurring in the body. Thoughts can leave a direct impact on such processes and potentially act as pain killer. In fact, there are studies indicating that controlling pain on a cognitive level can actually create a difference in opioid activity, leading to increased production of endorphins.
Another approach through which neurotherapy can lessen pain is the management of the emotional aspect of pain. The frontal cortex is the region of the brain that handles unpleasantness arising from pain. When neurotherapy training is applied to this part of the brain, it has been discovered that pain levels in both acute and chronic pain syndromes are reduced, with the patient developing higher pain tolerance.
Chronic pain is known to modify the brain’s functional organization. Neurotherapy can permit the reduction of pain by changing the link among the different brain regions, hence producing long-term modifications in neuronal networks that can offset the changes brought about by chronic pain.
True enough, scientific data has established that neurotherapy fights chronic pain in a variety of conditions – for example, in alleviating common headaches (especially in childhood and adolescence), migraines, and pain that is produced by fibromyalgia. Neurotherapy can also be used against post-operative and cancer pain.