Identifying and creatively coping with silent diseases related to brain function has been a passion and profession for Dr. Dan Chartier for many years. He is one of the area’s pre-eminent psychophysiologic psychotherapists.

“When I began in this profession many years ago, my earliest training included using biofeedback to help reduce blood pressure. Hypertension is one of those silent diseases until it develops to the point where other symptoms manifest.

“The Menninger Clinic, in the early days of biofeedback, demonstrated that a person could reduce their blood pressure by as much as 15 points using a thermal biofeedback protocol. For a high hypertensive person, that ability may be helpful in lowering medication needs, and for the borderline hypertensive it can make an extraordinary difference.

“We have been doing that same protocol in this practice for many years. It’s an example of the technology we use to help people become aware of health issues that are, in fact, silent and out of our awareness, but can be made visible through the use of various feedback modalities. Awareness is a critical, key ingredient in effecting positive change.

“A second area of focus has to do with what is going on inside our skull, in terms of brain function. We know, for example, that in many cases of chronic pain there’s a critical element of depression.

“Depression can manifest because of life circumstances,” Dr. Chartier notes. “These can be relationship changes, job changes, or simply the stress and strain of every-day life. And—literally—the brain activation pattern changes with depression, which we can observe in a quantitative EEG analysis. If this continues, the body begins to manifest the impact of the depression and that often shows up as some sort of pronounced pain syndrome: headaches, back pain, other kinds of aches and pains. And, frequently, the person is not able to get a satisfactory diagnosis of the cause of their pain.

“Further,” Dr. Chartier notes, “it’s a clearly defined phenomenon in the medical literature that any person who has a persistent pain that goes on for more than six weeks is highly likely to develop depression—a silent disease that complicates all aspects of life. 

“Typically, depression weakens the ability of the patient to manage and moderate the pain they’re experiencing, so they often slip into a loop: increasing pain induces more severe depression which intensifies the pain.”

Health&Healing: How do you address such a complicated cascade of events?

Dr. Chartier: Fortunately, we have at least two major tools in our arsenal to help overcome depression. The first is the neurofeedback process, which permits us to monitor brain activity. If we see asymmetries between the right and left prefrontal cortex, or we see the general slowing in the front part of the brain, we can engage the client in training to help the brain re-balance itself and speed up those frontal lobe functions. As that happens, depression begins to lift.

Generally stated, the process is a simple example of operant behavior: some type of distinct stimulus will increase the likelihood that the behavior will occur again. For the person with these challenges of pain and depression, our technology helps the client know when their brain makes even the slightest movement in the desired direction from this depressed pattern into a healthier pattern.

Following the law of operant conditioning, the brain getting the signal that it just did something that was good increases the likelihood that it will occur again—so the training progresses in that way. We are, in fact, applying learning theory to simple human behavior broken down to the simplest unit—which is the firing of some neurons in the brain, or the cessation of firing of some neurons in a muscle. It’s a very simple and elegant but profound way of healing.

H&H: You mentioned a second therapeutic approach in dealing with depression.

Dr. Chartier: Yes, I was referring to Nexalin, our 15-session transcranial electrical stimulating program. This is a unique program developed by an anesthesiologist in Russia who was searching for a better non-pharmaceutical approach to treating pain following surgery. In his research, he ran across the topic of electro anesthesia, the use of micro currents of electrical energy on the brain to disrupt pain signals and patterns.

His research led him to develop a very specific process using certain waveforms and micro currents. His work was further developed in Germany where researchers noted positive outcomes in treating depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Then Nexalin came to the U.S. where it earned FDA clearance and where it’s been in use for about five years. We were among the first health clinics in the country to begin using the protocol. And we—and our clients—are experiencing really positive outcomes in the reduction of depression and anxiety, and improvements in diminishment of insomnia symptoms.

Working with Nexalin, the client is not actively engaged as they are with neurofeedback, for example. They are simply the passive recipient of these very mild electrical microcurrents that help modify underlying patterns in really healthy ways. It’s a 15-session protocol that is typically delivered over a four-week period. As a therapist and a psychologist, it’s been really heartwarming to hear reports from clients a year following their Nexalin treatment, who tell us that they are responding to life events in a very different and very positive way, handling experiences that in the past would have sent them spiraling into depression. They all recognize that their brain is now simply responding to life events in a different, more positive way.