Happy New Year to everyone!
We have some very exciting plans for our continued growth and development which we look forward to sharing with you over the course of the next 12 months.
January is a good time to plan your Career Professional Development sessions for the year and also to book in regular supervision sessions to ensure you meet the required standards for membership.
Part of CPD can, of course, be reading! As such, we thought it would be a good time to revisit the fantastic New Scientist article examining the benefits of hypnotherapy.
In the last post we examined how New Scientist reported some of the benefits of hypnosis, including an examination of how successful it is for weight loss and anxiety related disorders. This month we’re looking at its effectiveness for pain management.
It won’t surprise Modern practitioners to learn that the article quoted a number of findings which found that hypnosis assisted in pain relief. It included a study by the University of Washington, Seattle, which looked at patients with MS.
The research included analysis of differing types of brainwaves and noted that the ones created in a hypnotic trance help the brain to adapt to new knowledge gained during the therapy itself.
The article goes on to explain the findings of a pain clinic in a Belgium hospital which found that hypnosis can create a sense of real perception in a patient.
It was reported that people in a hypnotic state, when asked to imagine a happy scene, created a greater level of activity in the parts of the brain associated with movement, compared to people who were asked the same when in a fully conscious state.
As Modern Practitioners, we understand the importance of brain elasticity in its ability to effectively strengthen the left pre frontal cortex to allow the client to develop in a number of key areas – including the ability to reduce certain pain signals to the brain.
It’s perhaps not surprising that the article goes on to say that other reports have found that the use of painkillers could be reduced for people experiencing chronic pain as hypnotherapy could be used to ease their symptoms instead.
It concludes there would be huge benefits in doing so – especially as some people find painkillers to be addictive which is not something that can necessarily be applied to hypnosis (even though the lovely feeling of relaxation is always great at the end of a long day)!