Biofeedback: Using your mind to improve your health
Biofeedback can help you to use your mind to manage certain medical conditions. Find out which ones, whether it's right for you and how it's done.

Have you ever wished you could simply will your symptoms to disappear? With biofeedback you may be able to do just that by harnessing the power of your mind to help improve your health.

Biofeedback is a type of complementary and alternative medicine called mind-body therapy.
It's designed to enable you — in mind-over-matter fashion — to use your thoughts and will
to control your body. Biofeedback is based on the idea, confirmed by scientific studies,
that people have the innate potential to influence with their minds many of the automatic,
involuntary functions of their bodies. To help you develop this ability, a biofeedback specialist uses signals from special monitoring equipment to teach you to control certain body functions and their responses, such as:

• Brain activity
• Blood pressure
• Muscle tension
• Heart rate
• Skin temperature
• Sweat gland activity

You can use biofeedback to help treat many physical and mental health problems when you've learned to recognize and control these functions and responses. (Continued in the "Biofeedback using your mind to improve your health" link on the lef).