For Referring Practitioners

How to refer

A formal referral form is not required. A phone call or email with basic clinical context is sufficient to get the process started. The following information is helpful, though not mandatory:

• Primary complaint and treatment goals
• Relevant psychiatric and medical history
• Current medications (particularly psychotropics)
• Prior psychological or neuropsychological assessment reports, if available
• Any known contraindications or concerns

Dr. Finnick will conduct his own intake at the first visit. Sharing records in advance helps him prepare a more focused initial consultation, but he will not require them before scheduling.

What to tell your patient

When preparing a patient for a referral to Tahoe Neurofeedback, these points are helpful to convey:

• There is no electrical current or injection. The sensors only record brainwave activity.
• Sessions are generally calm and not stressful. Most people find them relaxing.
• It is a learning process for the brain, not a single procedure — multiple sessions are expected.
• An experienced clinician will be monitoring and adjusting the training in real time, not running a standard program.
• A Brain Map assessment may be recommended before training begins, depending on the clinical picture.

You can also let patients know that, with appropriate releases, you and Dr. Finnick can coordinate around medication management and overall treatment planning — so neurofeedback fits coherently into their existing care rather than feeling like a disconnected add-on.

About Dr. Finnick

Dr. John Finnick, PsyD, LEP, has practiced clinical neurofeedback for over thirty years, including fifteen years of close collaboration with a psychiatric clinic specializing in child, adolescent, adult, and forensic psychiatry — working directly alongside a medical team on patients with complex medication histories. See full background.

Typical referral pattern

Dr. Finnick frequently sees patients who are already under psychiatric or psychotherapeutic care and continue to struggle with attention, mood regulation, anxiety, sleep, or trauma-related symptoms. Many are on psychotropic medications and have had partial benefit, but remain limited by residual symptoms, side effects, or difficulty tolerating dosage increases.

In that context, neurofeedback is used as a regulatory intervention: stabilizing key circuits, improving self-regulation capacity, and sometimes making it easier to tolerate or adjust medications. He also sees clients whose goals are performance- or function-oriented rather than symptom-focused.

For complex cases, a Brain Map assessment (quantitative EEG using the Brainmaster system) can provide objective neurophysiological data — patterns of arousal regulation, attention-related frequencies, and statistical deviations from normative ranges — that may be useful in refining medication management or overall treatment planning.

Clinical philosophy: individual patterns over normative averages

One point worth noting for practitioners who are familiar with the neurofeedback literature: Dr. Finnick is cautious about approaches that train the brain directly toward normative database averages (Z-score training). While normative data is useful for understanding deviations, he does not treat "matching the average" as the primary training target. Brains differ, and some statistically unusual patterns may be adaptive for a given individual.

Protocols in this practice are constructed around the quantitative findings, the clinical intake, and the patient's in-session responses — all three together. That approach tends to be more conservative and individually calibrated than high-throughput commercial programs.