Biofeedback
Dr. Ruth M. Maher is a Pelvic Muscle Dysfunction Biofeedback Specialist certified by the Biofeedback Institute of America to treat elimination disorders and pelvic pain. The Biofeedback Certification Institute of America (BCIA) was formed in January 1981 to establish and maintain professional standards for the provision of biofeedback services and to certify those who meet these standards.
What is Biofeedback?
Biofeedback opens a new channel of communication between you and your own body. Becoming aware of your own body can help it to become more functional. Biofeedback is the attempt to train the body/mind to recover its natural self-regulatory capacity through a learning, or re-learning, process. Also, by bringing awareness to the task of regulation, we can directly influence our own regulatory function. This can hold true for conditions ranging from incontinence to hypertension, from panic attacks to irritable bowel.
The biofeedback process simply provides information, usually on a meter or computer, about various bodily functions in order to achieve improved regulation.
At the Maher Sports and Wellness Centre we also use Rehabilitative Ultrasound Imaging (RUSI) and Electromyography (EMG) for muscle re-education. The person responds to this information in an attempt to move toward better-controlled function. For example, you can learn how to relax or facilitate appropriate contractions of your pelvic floor muscles if you have pelvic pain or incontinence. An EMG sensor along with ultrasound imaging measures the function of the muscles in question providing information to the clinician and you allowing you to know when you are succeeding. Success then leads to more success. This is a very natural process which gets things working the way they are supposed to. After all, the brain-body system has internal pathways to keep itself informed about the various body states.
In biofeedback, we simply support these internal pathways with external sources of information. It is these external feedback paths on your internal biological functions that make it 'biofeedback'. The process gives you information on how to re-normalise regulatory function. Commonly, information provided in biofeedback may relate to muscle tension, for example, or to skin temperature.
For more information please email us at info@maherPT.com