The "Chronic" Chronicles - 4-part BCIA Webinar Series

Pain. We've all experienced it and as professionals, you've all worked helping your clients with it. Join us for 'The "Chronic" Chronicles' and learn about chronic pain and conditions and how Biofeedback, HRV and Neurofeedback can be used to help your clients.

Session 1: Thursday, September 3rd - with Tiff Thompson, PhD, QEEG-D, BCN-L, LMFT, R.EEG.T 

Time: 11 am PST, Noon MST, 1 pm CST and 2pm EST **Please note this is on a Thursday**

Profiles of Pain - NF Mentoring Webinar

This presentation traces pain from the periphery to the brain, beginning with the distinction between nociception, an objective physiological signal, and pain, a subjective conscious experience shaped by genetics, stress, trauma, and social determinants such as income and access to care.

Participants will review the ascending pain pathways (neospinothalamic, paleospinothalamic, and archispinothalamic tracts) and the descending pathways that can shift from suppressing pain to amplifying it in chronic conditions. The talk introduces the triple network model of pain as an imbalance between the lateral, sensory pathway and the medial, affective pathway, and shows how the medial pathway's salience network circuitry (anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) overlaps with the circuitry implicated in depression, anxiety, and addiction.

The second half of the presentation reviews the EEG and QEEG literature on chronic pain, including the replicable finding of increased limbic theta, slowed peak alpha frequency, attenuated beta, and dysregulated gamma, as well as thalamocortical dysrhythmia and recent machine learning classification work. The presentation closes with a candid look at the current state of the pain biomarker field, including replication challenges and medication confounds, and what still needs to happen before these findings are ready for routine clinical use.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR SESSION 1