Chronic Stomach Pains in Young People under 18 Helped with Hypnosis

Dr. Perri Klass has an excellent piece in today’s New York Times on 18 and Under: A Prescription for Abdominal Pain: Due Diligence which details the frustration of working with young people who have functional abdominal pain which is a way of saying recurrent stomachaches with no obvious cause.

These sort of stomach pains are often dismissed by adults . . . in an off-hand way that seems to suggest that they don’t exist . . . this is compounded when the doctor suggests anxiety treatment which the parent then takes to mean that it’s completely psychological and therefore not real or even worse made up which is far from the case.

Sending the child to a specialist can mean more tests which can rack up the costs in backward countries that don’t have a reliable national health service where patients are forced to foot large bills or receive little or no service at all (progressive nations like Taiwan have far more robust medical coverage). In places like the US, sending a child to a specialist can quickly increase health costs five-fold, something that working class or lower families just can’t afford . . . which exasperates the problem as the “psychological” component of the diagnosis gets misread as a troublesome child or unwarranted expense when something very very different is going on.

Luckily, studies involving something as simple as guided imagery and hypnosis have been shown to be very very effective in helping young people with this chronic ailment.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/health/23klass.html for more on the subject.

If you’re in Taipei and would like direct help for this or other issues, feel free to check my webpages at http://www.briandavidphillips.com and contact us for an appointment. If you’re not in Taipei, you may wish to explore some of the deep relaxation audio CDs in my online shop. For those on a tight budget, check the Garbage Can mp3 in the free download section of my webpages (in the guided imagery mp3 folders) as it is a great place to start for immediate relief for many people.

All the best,
Brian