Chronic or acute pain affects one in five people globally. Yet proven techniques can significantly reduce symptoms, without side effects.

Chronic or acute pain affects one in five people globally. Yet proven techniques can significantly reduce symptoms, without side effects.

Here’s what we know:

• Pain affects around 2 billion adults worldwide (Mordor Intelligence, 2023).
• Pain is a leading cause of disability (GBD Causes of Death Collaborators, 2017).
• Pain can significantly reduce quality of life (Hadi et. al 2019).
• Pain costs the community and the economy. The costs are estimated to exceed the costs generated by heart disease, cancer and diabetes (Gaskin and Richard, 2012).
• Pain interacts with mental health and may coincide with depression and anxiety (Harvard Medical School, 2021).

Medication can reduce symptoms, but there are costs and risks. The prospects for short-term relief must be weighed against the risks of prolonged use, including:

• The potential side effects, such as nausea, drowsiness, and weight gain.
• The risk of opioid addiction.
• The ongoing cost of medication.

Hypnotherapy can empower patients to significantly reduce their symptoms. The evidence is compelling. For example,  reviewed 85 controlled trials and concluded that hypnotic intervention can deliver significant pain relief across a range of symptoms and conditions. Recent empirical findings include:

• Hypnotherapy activates key regions of the brain that regulate the experience of pain (Del Casale et al., 2015).
• The average reduction in symptoms tends to be around 30 to 40 per cent ().
• 9 out of 10 people are sufficiently ‘hypnotiseable’ to benefit significantly from treatment. Prospective patients can use our free self-assessment tool.

 The activated regions include the right anterior cingulate cortex, the left superior frontal gyrus, and the right insula. Hypnotherapy deactivates the right midline nuclei of the thalamus. A review of the literature on hypnosis and neuroimaging is provided in Oakley, D. A. (2008).

• The use of a direct analgesic suggestion is an important predictor of success. However, a combination of direct and non-pain-related suggestions may be most effective (Dillworth et al., 2010).
• Hypnosis has minimal side effects (Bollinger 2018; Hauser 2016). But it can have positive side effects, and it can be used to reduce the side effects of surgery and other treatments (Berlière et al.2018).
• Hypnotherapy can empower patients, which can have spillover benefits to their mental health (Mehta et al.,2023).