This professor is studying how brainwaves can cut crippling joint pain
Using neurofeedback, patients can watch their pain brainwaves in real time and learn to manipulate them to reduce the agonizing sensations
Pain is good for you.
Usually.
It lets you know you stubbed your toe.
You know you’re hurt because special nerve cells called nociceptors send chemical electric signals in just 150 milliseconds to the somatosensory cortex, right at the top of the skull – where the top button of a baseball cap would be. That lets you know consciously you just hit your toe on something, pain experts say.
It’s either, don’t do that again or something more serious has happened.
But sometimes pain signals go awry.
What should be an ache feels like torment, with pain signals reverberating throughout the brain, not just the somatosensory cortex, said David Sherman, an assistant professor at Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences.
It’s called amplified pain and it can leave a person in misery on excessive medications. Or it can even cripple a person, Sherman said, adding that “you feel it, the pain is real, even though the underlying source shouldn’t be causing such a severe reaction,” he said,
The reason baffles scientists.
But Sherman, thinks he can help patients suffering from amplified pain by using neurofeedback – a way for patients to watch their own pain brainwaves in real time and learn to manipulate them and reduce the agonizing sensation without medicine.
In August, he set up a lab at Northeastern with the help of a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health and he’s launching a 5-year study into neurofeedback, focusing on knee osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease where the cartilage cushioning the knee bones wears away.
“If it works, we have a new treatment,” Sherman told Northeastern Global News.
Knee osteoarthritis is one of the most common causes of disability in the United States, affecting 25 million Americans, most over 50, he said. And about a third of the people with the degenerative joint disease feel amplified pain. Sometimes the pain is so pronounced, people need knee replacement surgery, even though the knee should still function, Sherman said.
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Ainat Rogel, a co-owner of Boston NeuroDynamics, a clinic that has been using neurofeedback for about 8 years, said that there is real progress being made in the field.
“With neurofeedback, we can go to the source of the pain signals, not just the symptoms,” she said, adding that pain medications only address the symptoms.
She said the technique has been in development for about 50 years, but she hasn’t heard of a study specifically following Sherman’s focus on the knee joint.
Typically when assessing neurofeedback, the patient sits in a chair, like the one at a dental office, and in some cases, such as at Sherman’s lab, an electroencephalogram device, an EEG which is like a hairnet of sorts of dime-sized electrodes and wires is placed on the head. Then the patient watches a screen with colored light bars or colored waving lines.
The EEG maps the brainwaves in real time and they are represented on a screen as colored wavy lines, like on a seismograph, or in colored bars, where red bars and green bars rise and fall – with red representing pain.
By focusing, a patient can help control the signals, and over time, the brain can “rewire” itself so that the pain isn’t felt so acutely, Rogel said.
In Sherman’s lab, he will study people suffering from the disorder. Pain is either safely simulated with a handheld pressure device placed on a joint, controlled motion of the knee, or other methods, he said. The pain brainwaves are mapped in real time.
Sherman explained, “You can train the brain to not react as much to the stimulation of pain.”
He likened it to the famed Ivan Pavlov experiments of the 1890s when the scientist trained numerous dogs, mostly mutts picked off the streets of Saint Petersburg, Russia, to salivate to the sound of a bell instead of the sight of food.
“That was a form of neurofeedback” Sherman said, explaining that the dog’s brain was reprogrammed to react unconsciously to a bell instead of a meal.
Rogel said that there is still much to be learned about how the brain processes pain, but neurofeedback is viable for many conditions from from pain to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, to helping people cope with trauma.
“Medications help with a symptom,” she said. “Neurofeedback is healing.”
