Biofeedback helps teach patients to regulate, consciously, such functions as heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, and even brain wave patterns. Eventually, patients can alter their physiological responses without the machine. Some doctors are sending patients to biofeedback practitioners, and hospitals are adopting the technique for certain ailments. Even insurance companies are starting to cover it. Bob Whitehouse, a practitioner in Boulder, Colo., who follows insurance trends for the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America, says that about half of the major medical companies now cover biofeedback treatments for some 40 conditions.
Many doctors are still skeptical.
They argue that claims of dramatic results are not backed up by the kind of costly, controlled studies that pharmaceutical companies conduct on their products. But the National Institutes of Health has endorsed biofeedback to alleviate tension headaches and insomnia. A San Francisco State University study found that asthma patients who used biofeedback to learn new breathing techniques suffered fewer attacks and used less medicine. A study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted a large decline in urinary incontinence. And biofeedback techniques developed by NASA to help astronauts handle space sickness are being used to treat people with severe and chronic vomiting.