Use Hypnosis to Lessen Childrens Anxiety Before Surgery. It Can Lessen Complications!
8/22/2006
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There was just a Yale Study this month in "Pediatrics" (Pediatrics 118: 651-658, August 2006)that showed that children who are anxious before surgery experience a more painful, slow, and complicated postoperative recovery.
Zeev Kain, M.D., professor in the Departments of Anesthesiology, Pediatrics, and the Yale Child Study Center and the auhor of the article says that this is important because more than five million children in the United States undergo surgery every year and up to 45 percent experience significant stress and anxiety prior to surgery.
As a Nurse Anesthetist, I can tell you that pre-surgery anxiety definately increases the amount of medication and anesthetic a person takes during surgery and after. Any thing we can do a hypnotherapists to relieve this anxiety will be helpful and healing to our clients.
This was a five-year study and was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There were 241 children (aged five- to 12-years-old ) in the study that were scheduled to undergo elective tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy. The personality characteristics of the children and their parents were assessed before the surgery. The children had their postoperative pain and analgesic consumption recorded every hour.The children were followed up at home for the next 14 days.
It was found that anxious children experienced more problems when they were emerging from anesthesia and a lot more significant pain both during the hospital stay and over the first three days at home. During the home recovery, the anxious children consumed a more significant amount of codeine and acetaminophen and also had a higher incidence of postoperative anxiety and sleep problems.
"The results of our study indicate that decreasing the anxiety of children before surgery will result in improved recovery after surgery, reduced pain, and lower hospital costs," Kain said.
Let's use this study to spread the word of how important it is to ease pre-surgery anxiety and how hypnotherapy is a non-invasive, non-medication alternative !!
