The below info has been derived from the book, Healing Young Brains: The Neurofeedback Solution by Robert Walter Hill, Eduardo Castro.

Walter and Castro bring easy and understandable solutions to parents sifting through information overload.

The Emerging Theory of Global Dysregulation

Because of the wide variety of disorders that have been helped with neurofeedback, the idea of a global dysregulation effect is surfacing. Quite simply, if the brain is dysregulated; it can have a global or body-wide effect. Rarely does a client come to a health professional with a single symptom; and in general, the symptoms involve more than one body system.

For instance, a client may express their chief complaint of depression, but after a detailed intake evaluation, they acknowledge trouble sleeping, poor attention span, irritable bowel-type problems, low-back pain, sugar cravings, weight gain, alcohol use, irritability, and chronic anxiety. So the symptoms are not just in one system, they tend to be global or body-wide. Most often, once neurofeedback treatment begins, symptoms from several systems begin to respond, and the response generally has lasting benefits.

Contrarily, once the brain becomes dysregulated, it seems to have a global effect on the body. After all, the brain affects all functional systems of the body. Therefore normalizing brain activity would then improve body-wide functioning. It seems that neurofeedback not only affects such problems as attention and concentration, but has a systemic effect. When people are treated for ADD with neurofeedback, other systems begin to improve because the brainwaves become normalized. For instance, in treating ADD, not only does attention improve, but oppositional behavior, sleep, irritability, depression, anxiety, antisocial behavior, tics, and many other problems also improve.

Neurofeedback seems to have the ability to reduce or correct global dysregulation. The future implications of this are exciting; if such turns out to be the case, it could preclude taking multiple medications for different problems, or seeing several different specialists, each treating a different problem. Neurofeedback treats problems at the core—the brain—and when the functioning of the brain improves, it appears to produce global body-wide changes.