Clinical Hypnotherapy and Psychology for Pain Management

When you feel pain your body is reacting to harmful conditions to protect the damaged part of your body while it restores its form. Pain also helps you to avoid related consequences in the future, as if you know that something is painful you are likely to avoid it.

How it works

Pain is an unpleasant feeling that can be sensory or emotional and it is usually linked to the damage tissue. Most pain types of pain disappear once the painful stimulus is removed.

However, pain related to medical conditions, such as arthritis, cancer and idiopathic pain (pain with no apparent cause), may persist for years despite removal of the stimulus and apparent healing.

Main types of pain

• Acute pain, also known as short-term pain, is pain that has started recently.
• Chronic, or long-term pain, is pain that has lasted for three months or more.

If you have short-term (acute) pain, visit your GP and he/she will make a diagnosis and treat the pain.

If you have long-term pain it might be as a result of a diagnosed medical condition, a painful condition that is not fully understood or no underlying condition at all. This means that a different approach to managing your pain might be helpful.

You probably already saw some hypnotism stage show where the hypnotist uses a needle on a hypnotised person and the person feels no pain at all. Indeed, the brain has the capability to stop you feeling pain while you are not conscious of that. Hypnotherapy can also help you to manage the anxiety that was created by the pain and help you to increase your quality of life.