I’ve been thinking a lot over the years about why mainstream medicine has eschewed neurostimulation and neuromodulation for treating brain injury and other brain issues. Since my university days, I’ve recognized that the downfall of using symptom-relieving psychiatric medications is that dysfunction resumes when the person stops taking them. Yet they’re treated as permanent and curative.
Human beings have a tendency to stop taking medications when they feel better, sort of like how we take headache-relieving medications only while we have a headache. In addition, prescribers seem to prefer pills over equal or better treatment modalities, like time-limited dialectical behavior therapy, despite pills’ often health-injuring and multiplying side effects that lead to adding other medications, creating addictions, or patients deciding to stop taking them.
These pitfalls aren’t a problem if an illness or injury is temporary, requiring only temporary treatment; they’re a major downfall when the brain injury or illness is longstanding or catastrophic. Therefore, clinicians must begin looking toward permanent cures.
Today, it seems like “cure” is limited to the realm of infectious diseases or associated only with certain types of cancer for which medical innovation has developed a cure. “Cure” isn’t associated with brain injury. But it should be.
If it was, clinicians would become unsatisfied with symptom-relieving medications. Instead, they’d focus on treatments that get at the root causes, while ensuring the person remains intact, and that end once they effect permanent healing.
Neurostimulation and neuromodulation are neuroplastic treatments that come closest to curing brain injury. From my conversations with clinicians, I understand that these therapies, individualized on the basis of qEEG assessments, have cured some people with brain injury. After all, today’s treatments are built upon experience with guinea pigs like me. For example, the clinicians at the ADD Centre used single-electrode brain biofeedback on me when I first appeared at their clinic in 2005 as only their second client with brain injury and their first successful one (see Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me); but today, they use 19-point LORETA, which trains both neurons and neural networks and thus is more effective.
NextGen Brain Treatments
Neurostimulation and neuromodulation are like NextGen brain treatments. While medications affect neurochemicals in the brain, these modalities work on the electrical circuits and microglia. They alter the neurons’ connections and rewire the brain.
Norman Doidge, M.D, wrote: “[Energy-based] Neurostimulation helps to revive dormant circuits in the hurt brain and leads to a second phase in the healing process, an improved ability of the noisy brain to regulate and modulate itself once again and achieve homeostasis. Neuromodulation…quickly restores the balance between excitation and inhibition in the neural networks and quiets the noisy brain.”
Perhaps looking at these as the next generation of brain treatment would help clinicians perceive them not as tinpot science with no evidence behind them (both false) but as modalities that can either cure or dramatically heal with little to no side effects other than temporary fatigue (while overall energy increases during treatment) and lower blood pressure when prescribed by certified health care professionals.
NextGen connotes the idea of innovative, advanced treatments with fewer side effects that are distinctive from what we’re used to seeing, which is what we see with many neurostimulation and neuromodulation therapies. They harness the power of the brain’s electrical physiology and its regenerative ability. They restore microglia to their healthy state and enable the sweeping out of toxins that can lead to dementia. Many NextGen treatments are curative, in that when qEEG reassessment shows permanent healing, treatments cease. A person can exit the health care system and live life free of regular appointments. And unlike neurosurgery or ECT, one’s brain remains intact and healthy brainwave activity isn’t sacrificed.
For those with attention deficit disorder, the NextGen treatment brain biofeedback requires only 40 to 60 sessions, lasting 4 to 6 months, with no evident effect at first but dramatic, permanent effect by the end. On the other hand, audiovisual entrainment (AVE) has immediate but temporary effects that can last from hours to days. But over time, as I continue to heal, I’ve switched to more powerful AVE sessions and require some less and less. Temporary brainwave entrainment, with its effects built up over time, may eventually lead to curing some of my diffuse axonal injury.
Unfortunately, being a guinea pig after a catastrophic closed head injury may mean I won’t ever get to a cure state, but it doesn’t necessarily leave me in a permanently diminished, non-functional one, either, which current medical practice could have. So why aren’t these NextGen treatments widely adopted and funded? Private insurance companies will cover them when they include psychologists or chiropractors in their plans. Since OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) covers neither, we with brain injury in Ontario must find the few clinicians familiar with these treatments and pay out of pocket. Unfortunately, this problem is endemic to any new medication.
Even though all of the therapies I’ve used have been researched, developed, and in clinical use since the late 1980s/early 1990s, they’re not well known in the public sphere and remain misperceived as untried and untested in the health care realm.
The next time you ask a doctor to prescribe audiovisual entrainment or cranioelectrical stimulation or ask for a referral for photobiomodulation therapy or brain biofeedback and they say there’s no evidence, tell them these NextGen treatments are individualized and have been used clinically for at least 35 years.
Copyright ©2025 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy