Pain
-
Self-hypnosis was taught to 5 highly hypnotisable patients referred to Auckland Hospital Pain Clinic. Evaluation included the Illness Self-Concept Repertory Grid (ISCRG) and follow-up was at 1 and 6 months post treatment. Consensus grids indicated the subjects initially identified with physical illness but this association decreased over the course of the study. ⋯ An association between pain reduction and self-concepts is thus noted. This study does not identify whether self-concepts merely reflect therapeutic change or whether strong self-identification with physical illness indicates a poor prognosis for pain relief. This is a question which deserves further study.
-
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Biofeedback of somatosensory event-related potentials: can individual pain sensations be modified by biofeedback-induced self-control of event-related potentials?
This study investigates the effects of biofeedback based upon event-related brain potentials evoked by nociceptive electrical stimuli. In a visual and monetary feedback paradigm, 10 subjects received positive feedback within one training session when systematically showing two different behavior patterns: one pattern correlated with a decrease (down-training) and one with an increase (up-training) of the peak-to-peak size of the N150-P260 complex, respectively. ⋯ Furthermore, the individual pain report measured with a visual analogue scale was altered in accordance with the biofeedback-induced behavioral modifications. A decrease in subjective pain report was achieved after down-training while an increase was observed after the up-training.