Hypnosis and Arthritis

A wonderful study from the British Psychological Society that talks about hypnotherapy helping to get rid of the pain from arthritis.

It says:

"Arthritis sufferers can alleviate their pain by using mental imagery and hypnotherapy.

This is the finding of Bryan Bennett and colleagues from Bangor University who presented their findings on the September 11,2008, at The British Psychological Society's Division of Health Psychology Annual Conference held at the University of Bath."

Many people report high levels of pain even when taking prescription medication. A growing number of chronic sufferers turn to complementary and alternative medicines to lessen the main symptoms of pain and fatigue.

The effect of visualisation techniques and hypnotherapy was studied to see if they could help to reduce pain and fatigue, which affects these people from being able to enjoy a full and active life.

"Forty two patients were asked to visualise their pain in different ways and try to manage it. For example participants were asked to visualise their pain in the form of a person and then thank that person for letting them know something was not right. They would then ask the person to leave, visualising their image going further away, until the image was hardly visible and eventually disappearing, leaving them free of pain.

The results showed that these imagery techniques, and hypnotherapy, were effective at reducing the pain and fatigue caused by RA."