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Awsome! I talked to the epi center about it . They didn't know what it was.
it'll really help with other stuff too like the concentration (etc) ?
Jessica Ravitz said:... It's a field that has been largely unregulated and developed by people not licensed in psych or neuro fields, explained Othmer, who has been dedicated to neurofeedback work - training others and devising equipment - for more than 20 years. So while neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists are increasingly incorporating neurofeedback in their practices, as the work's efficacy and promise becomes more proven, there are plenty of others swimming in brainwaves.
That has Judy Crawford scared. She's with the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America (BCIA), which establishes and maintains standards recognized by the leading biofeedback and neurofeedback associations. While practitioners who are neither certified by BCIA nor members of associations might be legitimate, she said she would never trust her head to just anybody.
"How can you recreationally work with a brain?" she asked. "Do you want to recreationally take out my appendix?"
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Hoggan's business claims to subscribe to the spiritual model, not medical model, of neurofeedback. The weight of words became apparent when the Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing in January ordered him to stop "practicing mental health therapy . . . without a license." He said the order was due to language, including the words "depression" and "anxiety," that had been used in a now-discontinued pamphlet.
One of the biggest critics of outfits such as Brain Harmony Technology is D. Corydon "Cory" Hammond, a professor and psychologist at the Universithy of Utah School of Medicine.
He explained the intricacies - much more complex than the Hoggan method - of the neurofeedback work he has used in his clinical practice for 16 years. Hammond heads the standards committee for the International Society for Neurofeedback & Research, one of the two overarching membership organizations, and said his concern is rooted in consumer protection.
"In the last four or five years, we've started to really see an increase in unlicensed, unqualified practitioners," he said. "Neurofeedback can really do some wonderful things, but it is a buyer-beware marketplace."
In a piece Hammond wrote for The National Psychologist, he said there's evidence that "inappropriate neurofeedback training" can "increase seizures, depression, anxiety" and more. But he acknowledged in an interview that these problems could be remedied with proper neurofeedback.
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There will come a time, Othmer predicted, when insurance companies will cover neurofeedback treatments and drug companies, which have made a fortune on anti-depressants, may run scared.
Licensed therapists, he added, need not worry about job security. The professionals, he said, simply need to get on board and "be better than everyone else." As neurofeedback goes mainstream, he said demand for professionals - with insurance-covered services - will boom.
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Around for about 40 years, biofeedback gained popularity in the late 1960s as a way to reach "altered states" and "enter your own domain of spirituality," said Siegfried Othmer, chief scientist of The EEG Institute. "It was a way to have the LSD experience without the LSD," he said. And it was summarily written off as "too weird" and considered "fool's gold" by university psychologists, he explained. So it was the professionals who let biofeedback fall out of their grasp, he added. All these years later, now that they're discovering "it's real gold," he said they want it back, they want to own it, which is why there's a brewing struggle over who has the right to dole out neurotherapy. ...
Awsome! I talked to the epi center about it . They didn't know what it was.