Pain is an essential element in our survival. In fact, acute pain is our body’s way of telling us we are being damaged and we’d better do something about it -- fast! Without this kind of pain, our very survival would be threatened.
But when pain serves no useful purpose, when we have nothing to learn from its message, we need some way of effectively handling it. Medication can only do so much, and there is some pain that even powerful medicines have difficulty controlling. Headaches, back pain, arthritis and the terrible pain associated with cancer are just some of the chronic pains that can make our lives really difficult.
While the source of the pain may be located somewhere in the body, signals have to reach the brain before we become aware of this and pain can be both physical and psychological. Physical pain is that pain associated with an injury or surgery an psychological pain, such as phantom limb pain, is where pain continues to be felt in an amputated body part. This clearly demonstrates the fact that the brain itself is capable of not only interpreting messages of pain that come from the body, but that it can even initiate these messages independent of any physical cause. Psychological pain can be every bit as real and intense as pain coming from any injury.
If you have experienced chronic pain for any length of time, you may very well have the feeling that you are condemned to suffer from that pain for the rest of your life and this can be soul destroying and depressing.
People who suffer from chronic pain have probably already seen doctors, taken medication, perhaps tried alternative methods of coping such as acupuncture and still they continue to suffer. The constant awareness of pain can take over your whole life.
If you suffer from chronic pain, don’t despair, hypnosis can offer an alternative way of coping with your discomfort. Hypnosis used for pain control and pain management offers help where other methods have failed. In hypnosis you will be taught self-hypnosis and how you can alter the brain’s perception of the pain message, to turn down the intensity or to produce its own internal medication. All hypnosis is, essentially, self-hypnosis and once you have experienced the trance state, it’s a relatively simple matter to learn how to re-enter it at will and reap the benefits.
Hypnotherapy is used in a variety of situations for treating pain, including the following:
- Post-operative pain - where traditional painkillers aren't appropriate, perhaps because the patient is afraid of needles or allergic to medication.
- Phantom limb pain - amputees sometimes experience pain from limbs which have been removed, and research has shown that hypnosis has had impressive results in treating this kind of pain.
