It sounds like the work of sorcerers and scam artists, but hypnosis can play a very real role in protecting and promoting health. This isn’t the “You are getting very sleepy…” hypnosis you’re used to seeing in pop culture references, but a clinical procedure used in conjunction with other therapies and treatments, according to the American Psychological Association.
Hypnosis for health benefits “should be conducted only by properly trained and credentialed healthcare professionals (e.g. psychologists) who also have been trained in the use of hypnosis and who are working within the limits of their professional expertise,” according to the APA’s website.
The “state of inner absorption, concentration and focused attention” brought on by hypnosis may help us use our minds more powerfully, according to the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH). And harnessing the powers of the mind has inspired researchers and clinicians in various fields to explore the use of hypnosis in a number of health outcomes.
Medical hypnosis, sometimes called hypnotherapy, uses verbal repetition and/or mental imagery (facilitated by a hypnotherapist or one’s self) to induce a “trance-like state” of increased focus. It’s typically described as feeling calm and relaxing and usually opens people up to the power of suggestion, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Once disregarded as a parlor trick, hypnosis is increasingly believed to improve many of those outcomes. The American Medical Association approved hypnosis as a therapy in 1958 (although it later rescinded its position, according to the ASCH), and the APA followed suit three years later, according to Harvard Medical School.
That’s not to say it’s a panacea: In fact, more research is needed to prove lasting benefits of hypnosis for certain facets of health, such as weight loss or smoking cessation. But more promisingresults exist in other areas of study. Here are a few of the science-backed benefits of hypnosis to consider.
Hypnosis can help improve deep sleep.
In previous studies of the effects of hypnosis on sleep, study participants were simply asked to report back on how well (or poorly!) they felt they slept after hypnosis. But in a recent study, Swiss researchers were able to measure its effects by monitoring brain activity in a group of healthy, young women as they took a 90-minute nap after listening to a hypnotic suggestion tape.
The women who were deemed the most susceptible to hypnosis spent 80 percent more time in slow-wave sleep (the deep, restorative phase of our shut-eye) after listening to the hypnosis tape than they did after listening to a neutral spoken text. “The results problems and for older adults,” lead researcher Maren Cordi of the University of Zurich said in a statement. “In contrast to many sleep-inducing drugs, hypnosis has no adverse side effects.”
It can ease symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome.
In a 2003 study, 71 percent of 204 irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) patients reported improved symptoms after 12 weekly hour-long hypnosis sessions, the APA reported. Of those who reported improvements, 81 percent continued to feel better up to six years after the hypnosis treatment had ended, according to the study.
In a 2012 study, 85 percent of IBS patients who reported improvement after hypnosis still felt better up to seven years later. “The conclusion is that hypnotherapy could reduce both the consumption of healthcare and the cost to society and that hypnosis, therefore, belongs in the arsenal of treatments for IBS,” researcher Magnus Simrén said in a statement.
Hypnosis can quell hot flashes
Among postmenopausal women who reported at least 50 hot flashes a week, five weekly hypnosis sessions cut hot flashes by 74 percent 12 weeks later, a 2013 study found. Meanwhile, women who did not receive hypnosis but instead had weekly sessions with a clinician only experienced a 17 percent drop in hot flashes.
It can ease pain
Hypnosis is perhaps most well-researched in the context of managing pain. Two meta-analyses of existing pain and hypnosis research, published in 2000 and 2009, deemed hypnosis effective at lowering pain associated with a number of conditions, including fibromyalgia, arthritis, and cancer, but noted that few psychologists were using it, and those who were had little standardization in administering hypnotherapy.
Hypnosis can calm nerves
Because of its ability to harness the powers of the mind, hypnosis is often employed to relieve anxieties related to other medical procedures, like surgery, scans or even giving birth, called state anxiety. “The mechanism may be similar to the placebo effect — in which patients’ expectations play a major role in how they feel,”
Melinda Beck wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2012. “Hypnosis, in turn, can help patients adjust those expectations to minimize pain, fear, and disability.” More research is needed to determine if hypnosis might alleviate generalized anxiety disorder or what’s called trait anxiety, or anxiety relating to personality rather than a specific event, according to a 2010 review of the research. Preliminary studies have started to examine hypnosis in depression treatment as well, but more research is needed.
By: Sarah Klein
Is hypnosis just a trick of stage magicians or hocus-pocus for gullible New Agers? Not according to new research just presented at the European Anaesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam.
Professor Fabienne Roelants and Dr. Christine Watremez, from the Department of Anesthesiology at the Cliniques Universitaires St. Luc, UCL, in Brussels, Belgium, found, that by using a combination of hypnosis and local anesthesia (LA) for certain types of surgery, patients can avoid general anesthesia. That, the scientists said in a media statement, can aid the healing process, reduce drug use, shorten time spent in the hospital — and it could help cancer patients avoid cancer recurrence and the spread of cancer (metastasis), too.
The research team studied the impact of using LA and hypnosis in certain kinds of breast cancer surgery and in thyroidectomy (removal of all or part of the thyroid gland). “In all of these procedures local anesthesia is feasible but not, on its own, sufficient to ensure patient comfort,” Professor Roelants explained in the press statement.
So what makes local anesthesia work well enough to use for these operations? Adding hypnosis. For the first study, 18 women out of 78 had hypnosis for a variety of breast cancer surgical procedures including partial mastectomy, sentinel node biopsy (examination of lymph nodes likely to become cancerous from metastasis) and axillary dissection (opening the armpit to examine or remove some or all of the lymph nodes). The remaining women in the group had general anesthesia for the same surgical procedures.
The results showed that the patients who were hypnotized spent a few minutes more in the operating room but their post-operation opioid drug use was greatly reduced. What’s more, they recovered more quickly from their surgery and spent less time in the hospital.
The scientists also compared the outcomes of thyroid surgery in 18 patients who had a combination of LA and hypnosis with outcomes of 36 people who underwent surgery with general anesthesia. In order to decrease the invasiveness of the procedure, both groups had the same type of video-assisted thyroidectomy. The outcome was the same as in the breast cancer surgery — once again, drug use, recovery, and hospital stay times were greatly reduced among the patients in the LA/hypnosis group.
“In addition to reducing drug use and hospital stay time, being able to avoid general anesthesia in breast cancer surgery is important because we know that local anesthesia can block the body’s stress response to surgery and could therefore reduce the possible spread of metastases,” Professor Roelants stated.
“There is still a lot of debate around the exact mechanism that allows hypnosis to reduce pain perception,” Professor Roelants said in the media statement. “But what is absolutely clear is that it does so. The result is that one-third of thyroidectomies and a quarter of all breast cancer surgery carried out at the UCL hospital are performed under local anesthetic with the patient under hypnosis.”
“We believe that our studies have shown considerable benefits for the LA/hypnosis combination and that such benefits are not only for patients but also for healthcare systems. By using hypnosis combined with LA we can reduce the costs involved in longer hospital stays, remove the need for patients to use opioid drugs, and increase their overall comfort and satisfaction levels.
To date, there are few publications about the use of hypnosis in surgery, and we hope that, by contributing to the body of evidence on its efficacy, our research will encourage others to carry out this procedure to the advantage of all concerned,” Dr. Watremez concluded.
By: Sherry Baker
Hypnosis has become a common medical tool, used to reduce pain, help people stop smoking and cure them of phobias.
But scientists have long argued about whether the hypnotic “trance” is a separate neurophysiological state or simply a product of a hypnotized person’s expectations.
A study published on Thursday by Stanford researchers offers some evidence for the first explanation, finding that some parts of the brain function differently under hypnosis than during normal consciousness.
The study was conducted with functional magnetic resonance imaging, a scanning method that measures blood flow in the brain. It found changes in activity in brain areas that are thought to be involved in focused attention, the monitoring and control of the body’s functioning, and the awareness and evaluation of a person’s internal and external environments.
“I think we have pretty definitive evidence here that the brain is working differently when a person is in hypnosis,” said Dr. David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford who has studied the effectiveness of hypnosis.
Functional imaging is a blunt instrument and the findings can be difficult to interpret, especially when a study is looking at activity levels in many brain areas. Still, Dr. Spiegel said, the findings might help explain the intense absorption, lack of self-consciousness and suggestibility that characterize the hypnotic state.
He said one particularly intriguing finding was that hypnotized subjects showed a decreased interaction between a region deep in the brain that is active in self-reflection and daydreaming and areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in planning and executing tasks.
That decreased interaction, Dr. Spiegel said, suggested an explanation for the lack of self-consciousness shown by hypnotized subjects. “That’s why the stage hypnotist can get a football coach to dance like a ballerina without feeling self-conscious about what he’s doing,” Dr. Spiegel said. He added that it might also explain, at least in part, why hypnosis is an effective tool in psychotherapy for getting people to look at a problem in a new way.
The researchers screened more than 500 potential subjects for susceptibility to hypnosis and then compared brain activity in 36 who scored very highly on tests measuring susceptibility to hypnosis and 21 who had very low scores on those tests.
Brain activity during hypnosis was also compared with activity during resting periods and during a memory task, for both high and low susceptibility groups.
In the hypnosis task, the subjects were guided through two procedures for hypnotic inductions: in one, they were instructed to imagine a time when they felt happiness; in the other, they were told to remember or imagine a vacation.
All the subjects were asked in the study to rate how deeply hypnotized they felt during the inductions. Although some researchers continue to argue that hypnosis is a state produced by people’s expectations, not by biology, Dr. Spiegel said, “At some point, I just think it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling word game.” “I see hypnosis as a kind of app you haven’t used on your cellphone,” he said. “It’s got all kinds of capacity that people are just figuring out how to use, but if you haven’t used it the phone doesn’t do that.”
By: ERICA GOODE
