Can Hypnosis Therapy Treat Chronic Pain?
/By Pat Anson
The same academic institution that helped launch a nationwide crackdown on opioid medication has a new suggestion on how to treat chronic pain: hypnosis.
Researchers at the University of Washington enrolled 127 people with moderate to severe pain from spinal cord injuries in a study to see if hypnotic cognitive therapy could reduce their pain levels.
For one hour every week for six weeks, half the participants met with a psychologist over the telephone or online Zoom calls for instructions on how to practice self-hypnosis. The other half did not get hypnosis and served as a control group.
Both groups continued to get “usual care” for their pain throughout the study. About 75% of them were taking opioids or another prescription pain medication.
Patients who received hypnosis were not put into a trance, like you might see on TV or in comedy acts, but received a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. Through hypnotic suggestions, patients were told to relax, breathe deeply, and imagine themselves in a comfortable place without pain. Participants were given recordings of each therapy session, and told to listen to them daily and practice self-hypnosis three times a day.
After six weeks of hypnotic therapy, participants reported that their pain levels dropped by 19.3%. Self-reported pain continued to decrease after the sessions stopped, falling by 24.5% after 12 weeks. Nearly half (46%) said their pain improved meaningfully. There were also significant improvements in sleep and depression, compared to patients in the control group.
The study was completed four years ago, but the findings are only now being published in the journal Neurology.
“Not only did the study show that this treatment is effective, but unlike most medications used for pain, it is a treatment with many positive side effects, like improved sleep and a greater sense of self-control,” senior author Mark Jensen, PhD, a Professor of Rehabilitation Psychology at UW, said in a press release.
“I think that, based on the evidence, including the side-effect profile, this is the first treatment that people with chronic pain should be offered.”
Although Jensen said hypnosis should be the “first treatment” for pain, the published study indicates otherwise. The research team called hypnosis an “adjunctive treatment” for pain – which means it should be used as a secondary treatment, alongside a primary treatment such as pain medication.
Like cognitive therapy, hypnosis helps patients stop thinking that their pain won’t go away and will only become worse.
“Hypnosis helps patients be more open to ideas about changing their thinking and internalizing those ideas,” said first author Charles Bombardier, PhD, a psychologist and Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at UW.
Although there’s a certain amount of stigma about hypnosis, co-author Elena Mendoza, PhD, told The Seattle Times that hypnosis is an effective way to reduce pain and is less risky than opioids.
“Hypnosis is not about what you see on the movies. It is a clinical, therapeutic technique. We use it every day in a clinical context, and it’s working well,” said Mendoza, a Research Assistant Professor at UW who specializes in hypnosis and conducted the study’s therapy sessions.
“We really want to give people ways to manage their pain that are nonopioids. We hope this research is a step toward that,” she said.
Professors at the University of Washington have a long history of campaigning against the use of opioids. In 2007, several helped develop Washington state’s medical guideline on the use of opioids, one of the first in the country to set dosage limits.
Professors Jane Ballantyne, MD, Gary Franklin, MD, Mark Sullivan, MD, and David Tauben, MD, were among the original members of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP), an anti-opioid activist group.
Ballantyne, Franklin and Tauben also helped draft the CDC’s controversial 2016 opioid guideline. Opioid prescribing nationwide has fallen in half since the guideline’s release.
