This presentation will consist of 20 minutes of lecture followed by 25 minutes of group discussion. It is the intent of the presenter that the shared experience of audience members be the primary source of information for attendees.
No published professional literature exists on the use of neurofeedback (NF) with the dying. Yet the application is a natural extension of present clinical uses of NF. Foremost in the suffering of terminal patients are pain and anxiety, which the average neurofeedback therapist is well-prepared to treat or train. It is dealing with death and dying that is more likely to present problems for NF therapists who receive calls to assist a patient with catastrophic illness.
Little time will be spent in the presentation on the specifics of neurofeedback itself. We may assume that the NF therapist invited to help in these matters will be competent to handle technical issues and sensitive enough to adapt them as needed to the settings involved.
Instead we will focus on the wide range of tasks such a therapist will face. The primary task is self-knowledge about one's feelings about death and being with the dying. Inherent therein is the embedded task of desensitization to ones terror-which is an ordinary, expectable, and recurrent professional developmental task. The next task is to increase ones knowledge base, understanding the elements of quality care for patients in the last phase of life. Such understanding is additionally important in the developmental task of desensitization to terror of death.
We will turn to the tasks of the dying from the twin perspectives of educators at the American Medical Association and practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, noticing well these perspectives overlap.
Finally we will free ourselves to imagine being present at the end of life.