Thousands of Danes need pain-relieving treatment for chronic muscle- and joint-pain. People are different; our bodies react individually towards pain impulses and the medication, meant to ease the pain, also affects each individual differently. People, who suffer from chronic pain, may experience lack of sufficient pain-relief - or worse - they may experience adverse effects of the accessible medicine. A novel treatment paradigm may offer an alternative to the expensive, and often insufficient pharmaceutical treatment.

Neurofeedback is a method, which measures brain activity in real-time to train the brain’s ability to gradually regulate adverse behavior, as, for example, an oversensitive pain response.

One form of neurofeedback is to measure alpha-activity and use the results to train the patient’s experience of pain. Scientists have proved an established connection between high levels of alpha-activity and a “dormant” nervous system. This is why we often see a reduced alpha-activity with people, who suffer from chronic pain because their nervous systems are often in “alert mode”

Neurofeedback is able to measure the activity in that specific part of the brain, which handles pain treatment in a particular body part. This is important to teach patients self-manipulating of sensation of pain; the objective is to train the patients’ alpha-activity, to regulate their pain experience towards a level similar to people without chronic pain. The concept is based on a well-renowned psychological approach, the so-called operant conditioning.

The word “operant” comes from the Latin operari: (to work) and operant conditioning is built upon a behavioral-psychological connection between an action/stimulus and a consequence - within behavioral psychology known as enhancer. Perhaps you have heard the story of Pavlov’s dogs, who were taught to connect the sound of a bell with a reward. The concept of RELEARN is, somewhat, similar; The patient does a line of exercises, which triggers a (painful) stimuli. By creating a visual image of how the patient’s brain responds to pain, the patient will, gradually, learn to produce a more appropriate pain response.

RELEARN offers the possibility to train the patient’s pain response, the same way a heart rate monitor watch can help you target your workout and improve your fitness. The treatment takes place at a healthcare-clinic where an EEG-cap is applied to the patient’s head and electrodes are applied to the patient’s area of pain affliction (e.g., the elbow).

The patient experiences pain-stimuli by performing multiple exercises that triggers a pain response, which is visualized on a screen. Neurofeedback will be administered for a number of sessions, wherein the patient may gradually learn to control their pain response by reading feedback while performing exercises. The regimen is not a quick fix, but may over time help the patient reduce their pain. Do you want to know more about chronic pain, click here!

The psychological behavior is an important element of chronic pain, as people, suffering from chronic pain often, quite subconsciously, will adapt to the pain by changing their behavior in their daily lives. If one suffers from pain in the right foot, for example, one might compensate by using the left foot. In this way, operant behavior does not differ much from what you could call a habit. This also explains why people with, (especially) muscle- and joint pain quickly adapt new (bad) behavioral habits, to compensate for the pain.