Some 80 pediatric patients took part in pilot project to test effect of hypnosis during stressful procedures.
Even in a quick demonstration, Vicky Fortin, medical imaging technologist, was able to guide 9-year-old Koraly Lefrançois into a dreamlike state with hypnosis.
Koraly Lefrançois was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease last April and has had to undergo some pretty uncomfortable medical procedures at the Montreal Children’s Hospital since then.
The nine-year-old has had a catheter inserted into a peripheral vein and threaded through to her heart, in order for lifesaving treatments to be injected. She underwent a biopsy when a growth was discovered on her inner thigh.
In both procedures, a local anesthetic was used to ease her pain. But that does little to soothe anxiety.
That’s where hypnosis comes in.
“At first I was stressed, but after, I was less worried,” Koraly said. “The hypnosis calmed me down, and I was fine.”
Koraly is one of about 80 pediatric patients who participated in what is being touted as a successful pilot project at the Children’s — the use of medical hypnosis as a tool to combat stress and pain when undergoing arduous, protracted procedures.
On a pain and discomfort scale of zero to 10 (10 being the highest), the young patients averaged a score of 5.4 without hypnosis, researchers found.
Under hypnosis, the average score drops to 1.4. That’s a huge difference, said Johanne L’Écuyer, chief medical imaging technologist at the 
Children’s.
Inspired by hospitals in France
L’Écuyer, who led the project, said the research team started with minor procedures, working their way up to longer, more difficult ones. The project ended in September, and now the use of hypnosis is increasingly common, she said.
“We do more and more. We do even more invasive procedures as we go,” L’Écuyer said.
“The more radiologists are seeing how powerful this is, the more they push to have hypnosis on longer procedures. Once we did a procedure that lasted two hours.”
Johanne L’Écuyer, chief medical imaging technologist at the Montreal Children’s, led the hypnosis pilot project. Hypnosis is now being used more and more, she says. (CBC)
The pilot project was initiated at the urging of Quebec’s order of medical imaging technologists. The order’s director attended a conference in France a few years ago and discovered the practice in use there.
When he returned to the province, he asked L’Écuyer if she’d like to look into it.
She said she brought a team to France to visit hospitals, and “what we saw there was amazing.”
Anne Zeestraten, left, says her daughter Koraly Lefrançois benefited from the hypnosis. Vicky Fortin, Koraly’s medical imaging technologist, says she could see her patient dreaming.
Koraly, who is now in remission, would dream while hypnotized, according to her medical imaging technologist, Vicky Fortin. Fortin would tell her young patient a relaxing story while she underwent each procedure.
“You could see her eyes moving under her eyelids, and that tells me that she’s dreaming,” Fortin recalled.”She’s somewhere else. She’s under hypnosis.” Koraly’s mother, Anne Zeestraten, said with the hypnosis, her daughter wasn’t scared when told she had to undergo a second procedure.
“She was like, ‘OK, yeah, just find some other dream.'”
By: Isaac Olson
This study checks out is effective and safe for people suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
A total of 464 patients received 7–12 hypnosis sessions over a 12 week period. At the end of therapy, hypnosis proved to be superior in producing adequate symptom relief.
This study demonstrated that hypnosis was safe and provided long-term adequate symptom relief in 54% of IBS patients compared to conventional therapy. [more]
This study assesses the effect of hypnosis for insomnia with school-age children, ranging from ages 7-17, dealing with stressors and medical conditions.
The study included 84 children and adolescents with insomnia. All were instructed in self-hypnosis for treatment of insomnia.
Seventy-five patients returned for follow-up after the first hypnosis session. When insomnia did not resolve after the first instruction session, patients were offered the opportunity to use hypnosis to gain insight into the cause.
Use of hypnosis appears to facilitate efficient therapy for insomnia in school-age children. 87% reported improvement or resolution of the somatic complaints following hypnosis. [more]
In an effort to evaluate the reduction of emotional and physical disturbances in patients scheduled for breast biopsy, this study compared audio-recorded hypnosis with background music vs. music without hypnosis. It also included a control group.
A total of 75 patients were randomly assigned to a group and evaluated before and after breast biopsy for levels of stress, pain, depression, anxiety, fatigue, optimism, and general well-being.
The results showed that, before breast biopsy, the music group presented only less stress and anxiety, whereas the hypnosis group presented reduced stress, anxiety, and depression and increased optimism and general well-being.
After the biopsy, the music group presented less anxiety and pain, whereas the hypnosis group showed less anxiety and increased optimism. [more]
A meta-analysis examines treatments like meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy as alternatives for alleviating pain that is typically treated with opioids.
The more we learn about opioids, the clearer it becomes that there’s no simple solution to the opioid crisis and the cycle of dependency and misuse that has already impacted millions of Americans.
It’s especially difficult given how effective opioids are at pain management, particularly the kind of acute, short-term pain associated with cancer treatment or surgical or injury recovery.
Researchers are actively seeking alternatives to opioids when it comes to pain management—and a meta-study tracking the efficacy of mind-body therapies for treating pain that was previously managed with opioids indicates that some MBTs could act as effective pain management treatments, as well as tools for helping reduce opioid use and dependency.
The survey examined 60 studies looking at the effectiveness of “psychologically oriented MBTs,” including meditation, hypnosis, guided imagery, relaxation, cognitive behavioral therapy, and therapeutic suggestion, at pain management and/or opioid use outcomes.
The overview found a moderately significant association between MBTs and pain reduction and a smaller significant association between MBTs and reduction of opioid doses, as well as some relationship between MBTs and the treatment of opioid misuse and cravings.
Meditation was found to have the strongest correlation with pain reduction. The five meditation-related studies reviewed all showed participants experiencing some level of pain relief from the therapeutic treatment.
Four of the five studies also found meditation and mindfulness resulted in “opioid-related outcomes,” including decrease in opioid dosage, decreased cessation time, and dips in opioid misuse and cravings.
Hypnosis and CBT were also associated with positive opioid-related outcomes, with 12 of 23 hypnosis studies and four of the seven CBT studies reviewed showing “significant therapeutic effects” on opioid use.
Eric Garland, the study’s lead author, said his background in social work led him to a better understanding of the relationship between MBTs and pain, as well as the one between MBTs and opioids. “I’m a licensed clinical social worker,” Garland told VICE. “I’ve used mind-body therapies both for the treatment of chronic pain as well as the treatment of addictive behaviors.”
He said opioid misuse, pain, and MBTs all have one major factor in common: the brain. “Mind-body therapies make a lot of sense for the treatment of pain since all pain is in the brain.
If you use a technique that changes the way the brain functions, that changes the way the brain interprets signals from the body and therefore it will affect the experience of pain, as well as the person’s emotional reaction to pain.”
Since long-term opioid use can lead to brain changes like opioid tolerance and a loss of the ability to self-regulate opioid usage, MBTs can play a dual role for someone already using prescription drugs to manage their pain, Garland said.
“[MBTs] are all about teaching people a way to regain some of that control over the function of the brain and so therefore it can be useful not only for reducing the pain and helping the patient manage the pain, but also helping them gain better control over their opioid use itself.”
Does this mean people with opioid use disorder or who are living with pain from other medical procedures can ditch the Oxycontin and just fire up a ‘Yoga with Adrienne’ video? Of course not.
Research has shown that mindfulness and opioids don’t operate on the same parts of the brain, for starters, which means MBTs are a better side-by-side treatment than a ready-made substitute for medication.
The 60 studies surveyed included a total of 6404 participants who were already taking opioids, which averages out to around 100 people per study—a sample group too small to base conclusive solutions on.
Authors were careful to note that different MBTs were applied to different types of pain, with meditation studies tending to target chronic pain while hypnosis, relaxation, therapeutic suggestion and guided imagery treatments were more likely to be applied to acute pain.
Garland also said in the future, he hopes more research will focus on the relationship between MBTs and opioid use, rather than just the relationship between MBTs and pain.
By: Katie Way
