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Green, Drs Elmer and Alyce – Healing Pain - Sensation is still present but the agony does not appear
Identifier
027339
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Beyond Biofeedback – Drs Elmer and Alyce Green
… it is worth noting that a neurosurgeon, Dr. Norman Shealy, in his Pain Rehabilitation Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, has developed techniques for the control of … pain, and all kinds of pains too, through the use of techniques of self-regulation including autogenic-like training and biofeedback training.
Dr. Shealy told us recently that he had trained four paraplegics, persons with severed spinal cords and therefore paralyzed, who suffered intractable pain presumably due to irritation of nerve endings, to control their pain through learning to "turn on alpha," the kind of brain-wave pattern usually associated with detachment, with attention turned away from the outside world.
It is not easy when in pain to produce alpha in the occipital cortex, because the activating nature of the pain signal prevents relaxation, but if a person can nevertheless learn to produce alpha, the pain seems to recede.
Sensation is still present "as a signal," but the agony does not appear.
Pain control is to a large extent attention control.
Shealy points out in Occult Medicine May Save Your Life (Shealy and Freese, 1975) that after attention control becomes automatic, the pain is automatically under control.