The Canadian Medical Association Journal carries a piece on the Therapeutic Value of Hyper-Suggestibility which is well worth the read. The piece by Wendy Glauser appears in the news section for Jan. 18, 2011, and carries a very worthwhile overview of the current state of hypnosis as a treatment modality within Canadian healthcare and elsewhere beginning with an excellent summary of a case-study involving a sixteen-year-old girl who had debilitating stomach cramps later diagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome who was helped greatly via a simple elevator visualization for self-hypnosis:

“We were trying to figure out what the cause was,” says Rachel’s father. “It was really horrid.” Rachel was eventually diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome and saw several doctors, a psychotherapist and acupuncturist in search of a therapeutic solution. It wasn’t until she sat down with Dr. Daniel Kohen, a pediatrician and professor at the University of Minnesota, that she discovered a technique that would reduce her pain substantially, allowing her to achieve good grades, play sports and make friends. “Every morning I start by doing deep breathing. Then I imagine my pain as an elevator and I’m on the eighth floor but I ride it down to one,” says Rachel, explaining the self-hypnosis technique taught by Kohen. While Rachel says her pain used to be “always at level eight,” it now registers at “twos and threes.”

Folks who have taken certain of my hypnosis courses have been exposed to similar techniques and more.

Glauser presents an overview in recent trends and rightly notes that hypnosis approaches are not standardized:

Dr. Fred Janke, a family physician in Sylvan Lake, Alberta, once limited hypnotherapy referrals to smokers but now recommends it as part of an interdisciplinary approach for chronic pain and cancer patients. “There are a lot of good studies around hypnotherapy’s role in helping cancer patients deal with pain and the side effects of treatment,” he says. “Getting a patient to change the way they think about pain can sometimes be quite effective.” Janke recognizes, however, that “there is a great variation in the medical research literature on the effectiveness of hypnotherapy.” He believes the variation has to do with the range in techniques employed by hypnotherapists and would like to see greater standardization in the field. For example, while some hypnotherapists may encourage a patient to numb a hand and then spread that sensation to an aching body part, others may ask that a patient recall childhood experiences of pain in order to disrupt associations between anxiety and pain.

Actually, this non-standardization is one of the reasons some medical practitioners are reticent at using hypnosis or referring to a qualified hypnosis practitioner. Unlike pills which appear to be effective in the same way for most folks, hypnosis is much more subjective in application and experience. However, this can also be considered an advantage in terms of adaptability:

[Dr. Daniel] Kohen says hypnotherapy’s failure to lend itself to standardization is part of the reason many in the medical community are hesitant to view it as a viable alternative to pharmaceuticals. But he argues a “one size fits all approach would be a lethal blow to hypnotherapy” as imagery and techniques that work for one patient may not work for another. He employs various methods with headache patients, such as encouraging patients to picture themselves in a calming, peaceful place or imagining their headaches reducing in size. “You can watch the headache shape and colour in your mind get smaller and smaller, while the happy and comfort shape get bigger and bigger until it fills the screen in your imagination,” he says.

Read the entire piece at http://www.cmaj.ca/earlyreleases/18jan11_the-therapeutic-value-of-hyper-suggestibility.dtl.

If you’re in Taiwan and would like to give hypnosis a go, feel free to surf my webpages at http://www.briandavidphillips.com for information on live sessions or trainings or even shows. If you’re not in Taiwan, be sure to check out our free mp3s and products as well as our overseas training schedule too.

All the best,
Brian
http://www.briandavidphillips.com