Epilepsy and Natural Care

  “When the notion of retraining the brain was first discussed, traditional physicians bristled.  “You cannot train the brain, we need a medication to speed it up or slow it down.”  Almost every thing in medicine ultimately boils down to cutting something out or giving a pill–the cut-and-poison track.  In contrast to this, there is a wonderful concept in complementary medicine:  human potential.  What are human beings capable of?  Why can’t humans learn to cure themselves by learning to unlock the secret of what is going on inside the body?     We can do this using biofeedback.  We can feed back information to the thinking brain about inside-the-body events.  The thinking brain can learn to give subtle instructions to change these internal activities.  As practitioners, we had been using biofeedback for years in traditional medicine, but you would have thought we were from another planet when we suggested you could do this with the brain, too.     The notion is simple.  Just as your brain can learn to move your fingers across a piano or computer keyboard with ease, it can also learn to slow your pulse rate, lower your blood pressure, or have your immune system release more T-cells.  We just have to  let the thinking brain know how our internal organs or systems are responding to our subtle commands.  This is not magic, it is a learning process. Biofeedback provides the brain with the information necessary to attain those skills. Epilepsy was the key to understanding this feedback system.  There are countless patients with epilepsy who are unresponsive to medication.  They may have twenty, fifty, or even a hundred seizures a day, with medication offering no relief.  For years, biofeedback therapists worked successfully with these uncontrollable cases of epilepsy.  The therapist learned that by giving biofeedback information on a patient’s electroencephalograph (EEG:  a map of their brainwaves) back to the patient, he could actually change his brainwaves, thus reducing seizures.”  p.xiii. From Getting Rid of Ritalin by Robert Hill, Ph.D. and Eduardo Castro, M.D.