Bfe meeting 2006

AAPB NEWS AND EVENTS
From the President: Viennese Strudel and Other Memories
As I write this column, I am just back from the 10th Biofeedback Foundation of Europe meeting in Vienna. It was their most successful meeting with almost 300 participants from literally all over the world. It is really a kick to see biofeedback and neurofeedback weaving its way into so many diverse locales and so manynovel settings. A nonrandom sample of some of the participants will give you a flavor as to how other cultures and economies are embracing aspects of biofeedback. Two young bright Polish physicians, Ralph Sztembis and Joanna Mierzejewska, come to mind. He is a cardiologist and she an internal medicine specialist dealing with mind-numbing patient loads in a large hospital. Despite their 60-hour orlonger workweeks, they have realized that mind/body medicine must be integrated and have chosen biofeedback as the vehicle for this endeavor. Ralph has even taken the time and expense to translate the edited book by Don Moss, Angele McGrady, Terence Davies, and Ian Wickram (Handbook of Mind-Body Medicine for Primary Care) into Polish. There were all of us, the chapter authors’ names below a Polishtitle. Then there was the father-and-son team of Victor Manual Arroyo Magan (a neurosurgeon) and Victor David Arroyo Guillen (a psychologist) who came all the way from Mexico City, Mexico, to take workshops on biofeedback to integrate it into their holistic view of pain. They brought their Mexican charm and their insights into how chronic pain is managed in their country. It was very affirming toobserve how easily they were able to see that biofeedback could help. For some years, I have enjoyed collaborating with Christopher-Marc Gordon, a Scottish physiotherapist who has been working in Germany for many years. Chris combines HRV biofeedback with manual techniques and produces spectacular results. Because I see the same thing in my partnership with a chiropractor who does myofascialrelease, I organized a joint symposium with Chris to present our model. His presentation grabbed a lot of interest that I hope will lead to systematic studies of this combination. I was struck with the sight of Mark Schwartz and Frank Andrasik signing their latest edition of the text Biofeedback: A Practitioner’s Guide for more than 60 new buyers (that’s when they ran out of books). The fact thatpeople from Croatia approached me to ask about chapters I had written for these books struck me as wonderful. I certainly did not write with an international audience in mind, yet the questions, concerns, and strategies seemed quite universal. Neurofeedback is growing rapidly around the world, and the academic neuroscientists in Europe seem to be quite involved with these endeavors. There were a largenumber of high-quality presentations offered at the meeting. Many Europeans are active in helping create Infiniti suites or working on other software. Furthermore, opportunities for using biofeedback and neurofeedback in governmental agency settings seem plentiful especially throughout Eastern Europe. New technologies are emerging all over the world. We saw a demonstration by Howard Glazer of howa client in San Diego could be treated in Vienna with pelvic floor surface electromyography. The quality of the signal was certainly adequate for training purposes. These advances in telehealth are just around the corner. In addition, signal processing for all kinds of signals is getting so cheap and powerful that low resolution brain electromagnetic tomography, single photon emission computedtomography, and independent component analysis scans may be on the horizon for the average clinician. It is up to us to make sure that we use the technology for patient gains, not just to have prettier pictures to show. So just when Medicare, the Blues, or other downers have me ready to be depressed about biofeedback’s future, a trip to Vienna (along with lots of strudel) has lifted my optimism...