CAN HYPNOTHERAPY HELP WITH PAIN?

I suffer from constant pain due to a medical condition and the doctors I’ve seen tell me I’ll simply have to learn to live with it.

Is there any way hypnotherapy can help alleviate pain? Rob, email

Hypnotherapy is an excellent therapeutic technique to help with pain control in addition to normal medical treatment. Your subconscious mind has the ability to change your perception of pain even though pain impulses might still be relayed to the brain.

As a trained hypnotherapist, I’ve had the privilege of working with a surgeon while he performed an operation, helping to control the pain of the patient with hypnotherapy alone (no anaesthesia).

Approximately 20% of people have the ability to reach this measure of pain control with hypnotherapy, while 50% can manage pain control to a lesser extent.

This is possible because pain is a subjective experience (it differs from one person to another) and also because of the mind/body connection.

Rather than convincing you that the pain doesn’t exist, hypnosis for pain aims to manage your fear and anxiety relating to the pain.

It’s important to keep in mind that the nature of hypnotherapy means it doesn’t work for everybody.

But as a natural therapy with no side effects, it’s certainly worth trying.