Trying To Control Pain With Hypnosis

From ScienceDaily.com:

"Scientists have shown for the first time why a feeling of control helps us reduce pain. The research was carried out at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, London.

Using MRI scanners the research showed that when people feel that they can control their pain, an area of their prefrontal cortex associated with a feeling of security is activated. The findings are published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

When faced with pain beyond their control, people who tend to feel more in control of their own lives show a lower response in the prefrontal cortex, which indicates that they are less effective in coping with pain than those who don't expect to have control.

Patients with persistent pain say that the fact that there is nothing they can do against the pain makes them feel helpless. This feeling of being out of control seemed to tend to worsen the pain. On the other hand, teaching persistent pain patients psychological coping strategies to handle their pain usually did help reduce its effects.

Dr Wiech and her team set up an experiment to investigate how people cope with pain. In the first stage, volunteers were given an electric stimulus to the backs of their hands and told that they could stop the pain at any point. In the second stage, they were told that the decision to stop the pain was out of their control and could only be stopped by a person or computer outside the room.

With the MRI, the researchers were able to show that a number of areas of the brain were activated according to whether the volunteer felt in control of the pain. Most important was the anterolateral prefrontal cortex, which is associated with successful coping with feelings of anxiety.

The team also analysed the subjects' outlook on life, examining whether they felt in control of their own lives. They found that while the subjects' outlook did not affect the anterolateral prefrontal cortex when they controlled the stimulus, when they were not able to stop the painful stimulation subjects with no control expectations were better at activating this brain region than those with a strong control belief.

The findings support the practice of "acceptance-based therapy" whereby doctors focus on training patients to cope with the pain rather than attempting to make the pain go away.

Rather than constantly battling pain, the research supports the view that it is better to provide a patient with the tools to cope with his or her persistent pain.
They found that many people with pain are over achievers and tend to do more than they have to. This is why they teach people with persistent pain a toolbox of self-management skills to support them to manage their day-to-day pain. "

I have always known this in my hypnotherapy practice. Having experienced chronic pain myself, I remember that feeling of being out of control and what a gift it was to learn self-hypnosis and get my life back. This is what we as hypnotherapists due for our clients.