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Beyond Biofeedback – Drs Elmer and Alyce Green

An opportunity to explore [this area] again occurred soon, when word of this research finding reached Lillian Petroni, the wife of a colleague in the research department.

She asked if she could be "trained out of migraine."

I felt it would be quite useful to try, but explained that positive results were far from certain. The principles of autogenic feedback training (which is what we call our biofeedback procedures coupled with Autogenic Training phrases) were explained to Mrs. Petroni, and she was conducted through a fifteen-minute temperature-feedback training session.

I gave her a copy of the Autogenic Training phrases and one of the just-completed portable temperature trainers with which to practice at home. I asked her to practice every day for a week, then phone me. She followed the training guidelines and got excellent results. After two weeks of practice with the meter and phrases, she had stopped taking drugs and no longer needed the machine to continue the control over migraine.

She has remained free of migraine ever since (ten years). I believe that training in inner awareness and in control of relaxation in both the striate and autonomic domains gave her the ability to turn off chronic tension in the sympathetic nervous system (the "fight-or- flight” system, the body’s activation and alarm system) and helped her develop a more relaxed style of living in which migraine had no place,