Hypnotherapy helps with chronic pain

Chronic pain is insidious, it invades every corner of your life, it is challenging, it is eroding. I know, as I have suffered chronic pain for nearly 20 years. I had Encephalitis which left me with brain damage and problems with my sight, this resulted in constant pain in my head, it varies in intensity, but I have not experienced a completely pain-free day since 23 February 2001.

At first, I did not do anything when it was bad, I lay in a darkened room and waited for it to pass as I would have done with a headache before. But it did not pass, and I no longer had a life, I needed to find a way to cope. I am not alone in this.

A recent survey looking at data from 19 separate studies, surveying 140,000 adults came to the conclusion that approximately 28 million adults in the UK, have some kind of chronic pain, by chronic pain we mean pain that has affected the individual for more than three months. Around 62% of those affected were over 75 which we might expect, but the quality of life at any age is important and there are younger people in those statistics trying to hold down a job.

NICE have this month released new guidelines for the treatment of chronic pain, they have stated that they feel there is “little or no evidence” that painkillers help with that quality of life issues that I was battling with all those years ago. There are concerns about the harm caused by long term use of pain killers from paracetamol to Ketamine and of course the addictive risk of such medication.

The suggestion is instead of painkillers to prescribe exercise and acupuncture. The pharmaceutical preference is to prescribe anti-depressants. This is nothing new, I was prescribed one of the Tricyclics to help me manage my chronic pain all those years ago, it certainly helped me sleep, but left me drowsy and I would argue did lead to dependence, I longed for that moment each day when I could take my tablet and coming off it was quite frankly hell.

I decided I did not want to live my life dependant on a tablet and living a somewhat disassociated life due to the effects of the meds. When I began to come off them, which I did gradually, I stopped sleeping, felt wretched, was in severe pain and strangely, the palms of my hands itched so badly that I had to wear gloves in bed as I was tearing my skin and making it bleed from the appalling itching, as I write this I find myself stopping to scratch my palms, the memory of the sensation is so strong. I was so affected by the withdrawal that I would leap out of bed in the night shouting I have forgotten to take my tablets, so etched in my subconscious was the dependency that I had been given by relying on medication for my pain.

The NHS website focuses very much upon exercise to help with pain, this is of course because we release endorphins when we exercise that act as natural opiates on the body, which is all very well, but I wonder if anyone involved in the NICE guidelines that have filtered down into the NHS website has actually lived with chronic pain,  saying ‘get up and exercise’ is just not helpful, you need something to bridge you into the exercise which is what I did. The NHS site also says go to work even if you are in pain as it will distract you from the pain and stop you getting depressed, again I wonder if whoever wrote that, has lived with the eroding crucifying process of chronic pain.

So, what did I do instead? The prescribed exercise did not help me as I was in too much pain to face the light, my head throbbed more when I moved, acupuncture gave just brief temporary relief. I discovered hypnotherapy, hypnotherapy helped me to sleep without the sledgehammer effect of pills, it helped me to manage my pain daily and to be able to go out again, go for a meal, the theatre, exercise properly, meet friends and most importantly for me, to be able to work again.

Hypnotherapy for pain gave me my life back and I became fascinated about how it worked, my life had felt more or less over when I was only 34, too young to be retired and living in a darkened room, so I owe a huge debt of gratitude to hypnotherapy which I have tried to repay.

I went on to train to be a hypnotherapist and have watched people achieve exceptional change through it, I now train others to be therapists too, I am involved in the governance of hypnotherapy and I do have my life back. I still live in pain every day, but by using hypnotherapy techniques I can manage it. The one thing I very much agree with NICE on is that we need to manage the expectations of patients, patients can expect some miraculous cure, a magic tablet or process that will annihilate all pain and that just is not reasonable, but we can manage it sufficiently to have a quality of life again with the aid of hypnotherapy.

I am disappointed that NICE does not seem to acknowledge what hypnotherapy can do to give people some hope, to get their lives back permanently, not just as a temporary fix, it would help to bring people like me back into the workforce and not dependent on the benefits system for support. So many people are not in a position to self-fund their own treatment if they do discover all the data and research out there on the efficacy of hypnotherapy for pain. CBT is sometimes recognised as having some effect, that would be stronger in my opinion if utilised within hypnosis, but hypnotherapy does not get mentioned despite the many successful clinical trials out there.

It is hard to get recent statistics, but data from 2017, reveals nearly 45 million prescriptions for aspirin and paracetamol in the UK. In financial terms, £537 million was spent in 2016 on prescribing painkillers. If even a proportion of this money were made available for hypnotherapy, I feel we could affect some real change to people’s lives, remove the dependency on medication and give back a sense of self-actualisation, the empowerment to help oneself and not be controlled by the pain.

If you are interested in some of the research into hypnosis and pain, here is an interesting research paper titled Hypnotherapy for the Management of Chronic Pain from the International Journal of Experimental Hypnosis:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2752362/

You might also find interesting this article on PubMed entitled Hypnotic Treatment for Chronic Pain:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16404678/

To find a fully qualified, registered hypnotherapist, go to our find a therapist page: www.bathh.co.uk/findatherapist

Zetta Thomelin