If the hospital doctor gazes deeply into your eyes and tells you that you’re getting very, very sleepy, it might not be from any sort of anesthetic.That’s because the Wall Street Journal is reporting that many major hospitals are now turning to hypnosis as a medical solution for some of their patients.
Flickr From the Wall Street Journal: Hypnotherapy—when patients enter a trance-like state using relaxation and visual images—is often associated with alternative medicine. But increasingly medical centers are using it to treat digestive conditions like acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis… Studies have shown hypnotherapy is effective reducing symptoms associated with these gastrointestinal disorders. Insurance companies usually cover the treatments. The body of evidence is strongest for IBS, but a 2013 study found hypnotherapy was effective at prolonging remission in colitis patients. And a 2016 pilot study found patients with functional heartburn reported fewer symptoms.
Wikimedia Commons A typical treatment consists of about 7 hypnotherapy sessions over a three month span, with the patient doing home exercises in between visits. Studies show that the sessions work in over half the patients and the positive effects can last more than a year. And if you think, it’s just a couple of quack hospitals that are offering this therapy, think again. Patients are receiving hypnotherapy at “University of Michigan, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, University of Washington in Seattle, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and Loyola University Medical Center and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in the Chicago area.”
USNews.com In fact there’s a three to six month wait list for the University of Michigan program. Doctors theorize that many of these digestive and intestinal problems are caused by a faulty connection between the gut and the brain, and that hypnotherapy helps repair that link. The bottom line, though, is that patients are reaping the positive benefits of the treatments. One such person who’s felt the benefits of this method is David Dewey, a 58 year old real estate developer from Chicago. Again from WSJ:
Flickr David Dewey, a 58-year-old real-estate developer in the Chicago suburbs, says hypnotherapy helped rid him of abdominal pain that sometimes kept him up at night. His doctor at Northwestern told him that his diagnosis of IBS was incorrect and that the real problem was related to his brain. His doctor said, he recalls, “It sounds crazy, but we’ve been having great success with hypnotherapy.” He figured he had nothing to lose, since nothing else had helped for two years. The pain disappeared in under 10 sessions. “Sometimes it creeps back a little, and I just do one or two [home] sessions and it goes away,” Mr. Dewey says. What do you think? Does hypnotherapy really work or is it just a glorified placebo effect?