If you know a migraine sufferer whose migraines are well controlled on medications and who doesn’t have major side effects from medications, he or she is not usually a candidate for neurofeedback.
If you know someone still having migraines, or if you know someone struggling with side effects of medications, then he or she should seriously consider neurofeedback.
There are hundreds of cases that have been reported of migraine sufferers who trained with neurofeedback and reduced the number and intensity of migraines they had. Often health professionals report that medications have been reduced or even eliminated.
A case example: A retired chiropractor suffered from migraines for 30 years. Late one day, just as he was getting started with neurofeedback he got a severe migraine. He was in excruciating pain and considering going to the hospital. He reported that when this level of migraine occurs, there is no way to stop it for many hours or longer.
He was able to train for 25 minutes using neurofeedback. During that time, we made some changes to adjust the training till he noted some improvement in pain. We then continued with the last training settings. By the end of 25 minutes he said his pain went from a 10 to a 2 (scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the worst). After we stopped, he reported soon the pain had gone down to a level 1. He was amazed. He said he could not believe it was possible to stop a headache like that in such a short time – and for it simply to be virtually gone. He did not re-experience the migraine again in the next week.
This is not an isolated incidence. It is common to be able to stop a severe migraine in progress – with people who say it takes hours to calm down even with medications.
But that’s not the goal of neurofeedback and training. The goal is to reduce, on an ongoing basis, the number and intensity of migraines. Many clinicians around the US have reported that they often see that neurofeedback training does help clients learn to be much more stable and reduce the number of headaches and the intensity of headaches.
Treating migraines with neurofeedback - A look at the theories behind the treatment
Over the last five years of clinical work in neurofeedback training, it has become apparent that the technique can be extremely helpful in the remediation of headache syndromes. This includes both conventional headaches often referred to as "tension" headaches, and also migraine headaches. With respect to migraine headaches, two types are identified for neurofeedback training purposes: 1) those precipitated by premenstrual syndrome or food allergies; and 2) those precipitated by stress.
Although the neurofeedback training is not necessarily, or even ordinarily, done during the symptomatic phase, the training can have an immediate effect on headaches. Thus it is often our experience that a person with a conventional headache may have it eliminated, or significantly reduced in severity, within a half hour session. To a lesser degree, this is also true of migraine headaches, for which we have experienced roughly 50% incidence of reduced severity within a 30-minute training session.
Neurofeedback training can therefore induce a change in physiological state which causes the headache to "melt away". This immediate benefit may be appreciated, and may be taken as an indication that the training is effective. However, the objective is to train the brain so that it has a higher threshold for headache onset in general. That is, the training is aimed at improved self-regulation, so that the brain is much less vulnerable subsequently to the factors which may have triggered headaches previously. This is a learning process, which requires a certain number of training sessions. With a successful outcome, however, the trainee may experience an essentially headache-free existence. Many trainees have reported being free of migraine headaches for several years after undertaking the neurofeedback training.
There are causes of headaches which we do not expect to impact with this training. For example, "sinus headaches", in which congestion may be the precipitate cause of the headache, no remedy is to be found or expected in neurofeedback. One must deal with the underlying physical cause instead. However, many headaches can be thought of as stress-related, particularly if we take the word "stress" in its inclusive sense, namely that the brain is in a less than optimal state because of "stressors" in the person's life. In these instances, teaching the brain to self-regulate better affords it a higher stress tolerance.
With conventional headaches, a complete training regimen may require only about ten training sessions. For migraine headaches, the training regimen may be somewhat longer. In all cases, testing with the T.O.V.A is helpful in order to assess the person's attentional skills. Attention is one of the most fundamental of brain processes. Assessing how the person pays attention has been found to be also a good indicator of the status of brain self-regulation, as well as of the appropriate neurofeeback training protocol to effect remediation. The success rate for headaches has been extremely high. More than 80% of persons who complete the training regimen report remediation of headache syndromes.
