The word hypnosis seems to conjure bad images for a number of people.  I’m sure we have watched something, whether it is a movie or an animation, about people falling or doing evil things because of being hypnotized. So when you say, hypnosis for children, parents tend to be overprotective.

Actually, hypnotism is not bad at all. Studies have showed hypnotism helping children and adults deal with chronic pain, insomnia, stress, depression, weight gain and fears or phobia.  Currently, hypnosis is being used in pain management. 

Unlike the deep sleep that we know, people under  hypnotism or hypnotherapy are conscious on what they are doing and what they can hear and understand.  Hypnotism can be used to treat diseases and disorder, it is called hypnotherapy.  Hypnotherapy is used in pain management.

There are three strategies in using hypnosis in pain management:

Physical relaxation – focusing on relaxation while feeling the pain, reduces the pain to vibrate and escalate. When tension is mixed pain, this heightens the pain. Muscle tension tends to pull on the muscles where it is hurting.

Sensory alteration – this strategy changes how we perceive the pain. Focusing to a different feeling will eventually filter out the hurt that you are experiencing.

Distraction – focus is shifted to other things to remove any attention to the body part feeling the pain.

Actually there are studies showing how effective hypnosis is in pain reliving. Hypnosis with combined with other alternative form of medication like acupuncture can relieve chronic pain patients.  This can also be used to help children who are in the hospital undergoing painful treatments. Self-hypnosis against pain can be learned and be performed by children.  There are studies showing children who can do self- hypnotism recorded less migraine occurrence than those children who are thinking medication. 

Using hypnosis for children would show complications once the hypnosis lifted or removed.  Some side-effects would include confusion, fainting, dizziness, nausea, fatigue and anxiety.  Most of the side-effects are short-termed but there are some patients who experience stupor, psychological problems, and some patients even display recurring episodes of the previous shock.  Based on these experiences, it is imperative to investigate on the background on profile of the patient and screen those who are susceptible to the mentioned side-effects.

A problem may also occur when the hypnotherapist forget to lift the hypnosis.  The patient may sustain serious injury or any complication without the patient even knowing or feeling it at all.

Over the course of applying hypnotherapy to children, studies and practices  showed that children find it easier to face painful medical procedures like bone marrow aspiration, cancer patients, postoperative pain, chronic headache and remove anxiety tin children who would undergo surgery. 

Actually, if hypnosis history is traced, it would show that during early period, hypnosis is used to help patients who would be undergoing agonizing surgeries before anaesthetics were discovered.  When anaesthesia was discovered in the middle of 19th century, chemical induced  painless surgeries were favoured over tradition hypnosis.  When chemicals and anaesthesia is useless or not enough in relieving the pain, this is when self-hypnosis is used. 

Studies have showed that hypnosis for children was able to help them remove any pain and help them undergo medical procedures or simply just live their life.  But more importantly, we must identify that it is really, well sometimes, just in the mind. 



Posted by Arjun Singhe on 2009-07-09 02:45:14