Pain Management

Pain management is any treatment designed to reduce pain and help the patient achieve a reasonable quality of life and ability to function. An estimated 10 million Americans under 18 years old live with chronic or recurrent pain, the most common types of which are abdominal pain, migraines and headaches, back pain and facial pain.

Pain is pain; suffering is optional

Often, with chronic conditions, doctors tell patients that they must live with the pain. When traditional pain management techniques fail to control pain, clinical hypnosis can be helpful. Clinical hypnosis also can help relieve the sleeplessness that often accompanies chronic pain.

Clinical hypnosis has been successful in treating chronic pain, recurrent abdominal pain and pain from procedures such as:

•  blood drawing
•  injections
•  bone marrow aspiration
•  lumbar puncture
•  voiding cystourethrogram (VCUG) -
Voiding cystourethrogram (VCUG) is a painfully invasive procedure in which doctors inject dye into a catheter that is inserted into a patient's bladder through the penis or the vagina, in order to take x-rays of the urinary tract. This is described in an article from a Stanford University Medical Center study entitled “Hypnosis Reduces Distress and Duration of an Invasive Medical Procedure for Children,” by Butler, LD, Symons, BK, Henderson, SL, Shortliffe, LD, and Speigel, D. www.pediatrics.org peds.2004-0818 e85/cgi/doi/10.1542/

No side effects
Pain medication can cause sedation (sleepiness), cognitive clouding (“fuzzy” thinking), abdominal pain and constipation. Clinical hypnosis, on the other hand, has no side effects . Plus, it is extremely empowering and allows patients to take control over a situation which they previously thought-and were actually told by their doctors-was beyond their control.

Download the Imagery Discomfort Questionnaire (PDF)

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