Hypnosis and Pain Management

Chronic Pain Management
Pain is your body’s warning mechanism —it lets you know something is wrong and that your attention is needed. It quickly alerts you to situations that could be harmful, such as touching a hot surface. It also reminds you, when you have an existing injury, to take care and not do anything that could make the injury worse.

It is extremely important not to turn off or reduce pain without first identifying and treating the underlying cause. It is essential to consult with and have a referral from your doctor before making an appointment.to treat pain using hypnosis.

Have you ever cut yourself without realizing it and find that sometime later, when you actually noticed the cut, it started to feel painful? Up until that moment, your mind had successfully ignored the pain signals from your body. We are all naturally able to do this.

Hypnosis can enable you to release natural pain-blockers called encaphalins and endorphins into your body to lessen or eliminate suffering. It can also help you learn to tune out or turn down chronic pain. Hypnosis has been successfully used with arthritis patients, victims of back injury, cancer victims, Irritable Bowel Syndrome and fibromyalgia patients. It has even been used to dramatically lower the acute pain of childbirth.

Almost all pain will respond to hypnosis, whatever the cause. Of course, it takes practice. The more you use it, the better it will work for you. You can’t expect to be hypnotized once and have your back pain disappear for the rest of your life. But with practice you can achieve remarkable results.

The trained therapists at Advanced Hypnosis of America will help you learn to diminish and manage your pain.

Hypnosis Reduces Pain and Speeds up Recovery from Surgery
“Since 1992, we have used hypnosis routinely in more than 1400 patients undergoing surgery. We found that hypnosis used in patients as an adjunct to conscious sedation and local anesthesia was associated with improved intraoperative patient comfort, and with reduced anxiety, pain, intraoperative requirements for anxiolytic and analgesic drugs, optimal surgical conditions and a faster recovery of the patient. We reported our clinical experience and our fundamental research.”
Faymonville ME, Defechereux T, Joris J, Adant JP, Hamoir E, Meurisse M.
Service d’Anesthesie-Reanimation, Universite de Liege. Rev Med Liege. 1998 Jul;53(7):414-8.

Hypnosis Has a Reliable and Significant Impact on Acute and Chronic Pain
”Hypnosis has been demonstrated to reduce analogue pain, and studies on the mechanisms of laboratory pain reduction have provided useful applications to clinical populations. Studies showing central nervous system activity during hypnotic procedures offer preliminary information concerning possible physiological mechanisms of hypnotic analgesia. Randomized controlled studies with clinical populations indicate that hypnosis has a reliable and significant impact on acute procedural pain and chronic pain conditions. Methodological issues of this body of research are discussed, as are methods to better integrate hypnosis into comprehensive pain treatment.”
Hypnosis and clinical pain. Patterson DR, Jensen MP.
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle 98104 Psychol Bull. 2003 Jul;129(4):495-521.