Hypnosis as a treatment method

Warwell devoted most of his professional life to collecting evidence of the success of using hypnosis to treat a single ailment – irritable bowel syndrome. IBS is considered a functional disease, a somewhat derogatory term that is used when a patient suffers from unpleasant symptoms, but doctors do not understand what is wrong with it. According to Warwell, his patients, some of whom were in so much pain that they even wanted to commit suicide, are not taken seriously by doctors. “And I decided to resort to hypnosis, because the traditional methods of treating such diseases are below all criticism.”

Warwell briefly explains to patients how the intestines function, and then teaches them to use certain visual or tactile sensations (say, a feeling of warmth) in order to imagine that their intestines are working properly. And this approach seems to be working: IBS has become the only disease for which hypnosis has become a treatment method officially recommended by the British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. However, it is still difficult for Warwell to convince doctors to prescribe this method of treatment. “We have received a lot of irrefutable results, but people still do not want to agree with them,” he notes.

Part of the problem here is that we still don’t really understand how hypnosis actually works. What is clear is that in a hypnotized state, a person is able to influence his body in some new ways. As Warwell showed, under hypnosis, some of the IBS sufferers managed to moderate intestinal contractions: as a rule, it is not possible to do this consciously. At the same time, their intestinal walls became less sensitive to pain.

Hypnosis probably somehow affects physiological pathways similar to those that play a role in the application of the placebo effect, Kirsch suggests. In any case, the diseases that can be treated using these two methods are largely the same, and in both cases the mechanism of assumptions and expectations is involved — in other words, the patient’s faith in a certain result of therapy. There is also a negative side here: some people have a weaker reaction to hypnosis than others.

Most clinical trials investigating hypnosis are not very large-scale, largely due to lack of funding, but they show that hypnosis can be useful for managing pain, treating anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, obesity, asthma, and skin problems such as psoriasis or warts. It is not easy to find a good hypnotherapist, because the profession is not regulated by law. However, apparently, hypnotizing yourself is no less effective. Warwell states, “Self—hypnosis is an essential component of such treatment.”

Milton Erickson, a famous hypnotherapist, was a true master of his craft, who was able to put a patient into a trance by directing complex stories revealed as a result of hypnosis either into the conscious, rational (left) hemisphere of the brain, or into the wise, omniscient unconscious (right) hemisphere. During hypnotic induction, the patient begins to trust the unconscious sphere of his psyche more and more and stops trying to control anything with the help of rational, linear mechanisms of thinking. Hypnosis is not only a very effective way to quickly switch the brain from attention focused on the outside world to introspective mode, resulting in a trance in the patient. Repeated sessions of Ericksonian hypnosis change the way the patient makes important decisions no longer in a trance, but in a normal state. Many patients who regularly visited Erickson learned to trust their inner wisdom more and make decisions based on it.

Source: Elements

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