Pain Management and Enhanced Healing USING HYPNOSIS.

I consider myself to be very fortunate for I am a hospital chaplain and certified hypnotherapist. As Director of Pastoral Care at Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital, I have full support for the use of hypnotherapy in my pastoral ministry from both the Administration and Medical Staff of our hospital. I receive many consults from our doctors for stop smoking, weight control, stress management, pain management and other problems. This article will focus on pain management.

Like Baskin Robbin's ice cream, pain comes in many different flavors. Pain comes in three main flavors with different variations of each of the three divisions. The three main flavors are physical, emotional and spiritual. In this presentation I will focus on physical pain, preparation for surgery, post surgery, pain management for those who are suffering and enhancement of healing.

In using hypnosis to reduce and eliminate pain, it must be remembered that pain is a warning that something is wrong. When part of your body is injured or damaged, nerves in that area release chemical signals. Other nerves act like tiny telephone wires and send these signals to your brain where they are recognized as pain. Pain "tells" you that you need to do something. For example, if you touch a hot stove, the pain signal makes you pull away your hand to prevent further injury. This type of pain is useful because it is your body's way of protecting you from further injury. Long-lasting pain, for example the pain of an injured back, is a bit different. While it is also an alarm that tells you something is wrong, it often isn't sufficiently relieved when you treat it. Controlling this type of pain is important since it can disrupt your life.

I use hypnosis to help reduce pain for a patient when requested to by the patient's doctor. I use self-hypnosis to relieve pain for myself when I would use an aspirin or other non-prescription medicine. If I were to have recurring pain, such as a headache, I would go to my doctor for a check-up. While running, I turned my ankle. I sat down on the sidewalk and used self-hypnosis to reduce and eliminate pain from a turned ankle. I did not get up and start running again. I limped home, putting as little pressure on the injured ankle as I could. Later that day, I had it checked by my doctor to make sure there were no breaks or ligament damage. The doctor discovered no problems. If there had been problems and I had gotten up from that accident and begun to run, I may have felt no pain, but increased the damage to my ankle. Hypnosis should be used in conjunction with proper medical care but not in place of proper care.

In an article that appeared in the New Orleans Times Picayune which was taken from the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, there is the report of a major 90 minute orthopedic operation on a 33 year old Minneapolis man while he was totally conscious, but in a hypnotic trance. The patient said, "I didn't feel any pain." The patient had requested hypnosis because he did not like the "loss of control" and the "hangover" from general anesthesia.

During the procedures, surgeons removed a metal plate, pins, and screws that were placed there several years before to hold the patient's hip bone together after it was fractured in a motorcycle accident. He said, "I felt a sensation; it's hard to describe. They were chopping away pieces of bone, and they really had to twist to get screws out." The hypnotist had seen the patient four times before the surgery, so they could get acquainted. During the last two sessions, the patient was hypnotized in preparation for surgery.

There are two general classifications of pain: acute and chronic. Acute pain is associated with the sudden outset of pain such as a broken arm, a cut finger, a burn on the hand and is generally more intense than chronic pain. Chronic pain is usually of an ongoing nature such as back pain or arthritis and intensity may vary.

The experience of pain is a combination of the type of pain, tension, fear and anxiety. Often tension, fear and anxiety can intensify the experience of pain. Pain causes tension and tightening up of the affected area of the body. Our normal response to pain is to resist the pain by tightening up even more, becoming even more tense. This increases the severity of the pain experience. Focusing on the pain also intensifies the experience of a pain. I visited a 16 year old boy who had knee surgery. He was giving the nurses and his grandmother a lot of trouble complaining and crying about the pain he was experiencing. He wanted his pain medicine much sooner than the physician had directed or which would have been safe for him. I did not have physician referral so asked him if he had ever been to a football game. He said that he had. Have you ever used field glasses while watching the game and he said, "Yes." I reminded him that when he had the field glasses on the quarterback, you could see him much better, but you missed what going on over the rest of the field. When you focus on a pain, you intensify the pain. Think of something and imagine doing that for a while and as you do, you find yourself feeling better and better--and he did.

By relaxation of the body there is a natural reduction of pain. By proper suggestion and guided imagery in the hypnotic state, the experience of pain can be reduced or eliminated for periods of time. I teach the client self hypnosis and imagery so that the client can use it when needed. I tell the patient that our desire is to eliminate the pain for a time but to reduce the pain when elimination is not possible. I say, "Suppose there was a pain scale and the most someone could suffer without passing out was a 10 and just the awareness that something was wrong was a 1. If you were hurting at an 8 and could lower it to a 3, wouldn't that be nice?" Following that hypnosis is used to help the patients.

Dr Durbin and Joyce Hansen, members of IMDHA, will present a two-day workshop, Medical Hypnosis, concentrating on pain management, enhanced healing and working with health-care professionals at the IMDHA Conference, October 26-31, 2000.

Chaplain Paul G. Durbin, Ph.D., Director of Pastoral Care and Clinical Hypnotherapy, Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital 5620 Read Blvd. New Orleans, LA 70127 Phone: [phone] E-mail: [e-mail] http://www.pdurbinhypnosis.webprovider.com/