Author: Siegfried Othmer

The amount of true foreign aid (i.e., non-military development support) given by the United States is now down to about one tenth of one percent of our GNP (0.13% according to one account). At such levels there is a complete mismatch between resources and needs, so one might well use the idea of triage to answer the question about how such limited resources might be deployed. This was done at this year’s Copenhagen Consensus Conference by some esteemed economists. They deployed an imaginary budget of $50 Billion in the following way: $27 Billion for fighting AIDS; $13B for fighting malaria; and $12B for improving nutrition. Finally they proposed an initiative to reform international trade, which had no monetary impact. The astute will observe first of all that they over-committed their budget by 4%, but it would be frivolous to quibble, since nothing of magnitude is going to be available near term in any event. So it is far more important to contemplate that if $27B is the realistic cost of tackling AIDS with prospects of success, then what does the absence of such funds imply? The problem here is in our face more even than global warming, or the threat of international scourges by opportunistic diseases. This is here and now, with Asia, including India, China, and Russia at the threshold of a tipping point into runaway conditions. In Africa, of course, we are already at the point where AIDS is eating away at the core of societies that were at best functioning marginally before.

A couple of years ago, President Bush went to Africa to announce a five-year $15B plan to fight AIDS. Iraq got in the way. An economist would analyze this in terms of opportunity cost—in this case the opportunity to avoid future costs. The commitment to Iraq delayed a commitment to AIDS, under conditions where such delay has grave and near-term consequences. Continue reading “Triage”

The issue of the states’ authority to regulate medical usage of marijuana is currently before the Supreme Court, at a time when the chief architect for the reconstruction of a viable body of “states’ rights” is at home recuperating from surgery. What delicious ironies abound when those on the Court most strongly bent in favor of regulating individual behavior are also those who would carve out an appropriate domain for the exercise of discretion by individual states.

Joseph Russoniello, former US Attorney for Northern California and a Republican, recently took the rather aggrandizing position that even home-grown marijuana can be targeted by the Federal regulators through the interstate commerce clause. Growing marijuana is simply a substitute for buying it, and hence constitutes economic activity subject to regulation, he suggested. “It doesn’t have to have a direct impact on interstate commerce. To the extent that she is using this marijuana which she is growing herself she is not buying cannabis that is available in the drug market.” This argument would make even growing rutabagas in one’s garden part of interstate commerce, or doing neurofeedback in the privacy of one’s home. The mind races on: Home cooking deprives restaurants of business, and is therefore part of interstate commerce also. And the raising of children displaces the need for childcare workers, who are part of interstate commerce…. This kind of thinking needs to be nipped in the bud…. Continue reading “Marijuana”

Flying into Zurich one is immediately impressed with the orderliness of the country. Nothing appears to be out of place, even out in the fields, around the barns, and along the sides of the roads. I was reminded of Oslo, Norway, which comes close in this regard. I had a great reception in Switzerland, which must have the highest density of neurofeedback professionals outside of the Czech Republic, numbering more than in all of Germany even with a population one-tenth the size. Many practitioners there are oriented toward Val Brown’s NCP, and Pete Van Deusen is popular as well.

The fact that almost nothing is out of place in Switzerland gives the land a sense of stasis. The whole country still looks traditional, with new houses being built in the old style. Villages look like they always have, except for the asphalt and indoor plumbing. Roads remain narrow and curvy, in that full respect is paid to the buildings that were there first. But this is also the country with the highest median income, if one disregards capital havens such as Monaco and the Cayman Islands. The country is almost completely middle class. That is to say, there are no poor people. And it is too cold for street people. Obviously the well-to-do are here also, but they don’t show it off. Continue reading “Newsletter reporting on trip to Switzerland”

Today is Sunday; this must be Zurich.
Life has been just a little like that recently. A well-attended public lecture and advanced training course in Alexandria, Virginia; the NF Conference in Mexico; the BSC meeting in San Francisco, and now a public lecture, Introductory and Advanced training course in Switzerland, all in less than four weeks. Right now we are still pushing to make things happen. What happens when there is an actual demand for our appearances, when there is pull as well as push?

I still need to report on the BSC Conference, where Victoria Ibric and I conducted a panel on pain management. My talk tended toward the theoretical, where I made my usual case for the General Self-Regulation Model and for the conceptual reunification of peripheral and EEG biofeedback. Victoria summarized her extensive case histories on chronic pain and found that for those people who stayed for at least twenty sessions, there was substantial benefit found by more than 90% of patients. Continue reading “Today is Sunday; this must be Zurich.”

Kurt and I just returned from an exhilarating conference in Mexico that inaugurated the new Mexican Society for Biofeedback and Neurofeedback with its first “International Congress of Neurofeedback in Mexico”, taking place at the resort hotel Hacienda San Miguel Regla, in the mountainous regions north of Mexico City.

The scheduling of the conference had been adjusted a number of times to suit the needs of the invited speakers, and ultimately most of the invitees were able to make it: Barry Sterman, Joel Lubar, Jay Gunkelman, Marvin Sams, Peter Smith, Tom Collura, Steven Baskin, and I. The conference organizers had received governmental support for the conference, and in fact the health minister of the State of Hidalgo was present for the opening session and even addressed the audience. Continue reading “Mexican Society for Biofeedback and Neurofeedback”

In the June 25 2004 issue of Science Magazine there is a review article titled “Neuronal Oscillations in Cortical Networks.” The principal significance of this paper is simply that it is appearing in Science. This article could be one of the significant building blocks on which a reconstruction of brain models in the bioelectrical domain can be built, one that is much more congenial to neurofeedback. The next step of the argument is that we have a technique that can intervene with these bio-electrical mechanisms.

The Efficacy Document put out by the ISNR and the AAPB assumes that this additional step in the line of argument can only be accomplished through suitably blinded and controlled studies. Otherwise we are stuck at the starting line. However, when I look at our “near neighbors” in the clinical world, some of these technologies do not seem to be similarly handicapped. For example, Scientific American published an article on virtual reality therapy in its August 2004 issue. The article highlighted the possibilities for managing fear of flying, phobias, and even chronic pain. No one appears to be holding their breath waiting for the definitive controlled studies. So the field of virtual reality is off and running. The question posed is simply whether the appointed task of moderating fear of flying, or fear of tarantulas, can be accomplished. There is no second-guessing afterwards about whether the virtual reality exercise actually had something to do with the recovery. Continue reading “How do we go forward?”