How can hypnosis be used to alter someone's perception of pain?
There are three main strategies. One is physical relaxation. When people are in pain, they are also often tense. Muscle tension tends to exacerbate the pain by pulling on the area that hurts. So rather than fighting the pain, if one can focus on an image that conveys relaxation, like floating, the pain can be reduced.
The second strategy is sensory alteration. You can actually change your perception of pain. For example, you can imagine that your hand that hurts is in a pool of cold ice water in an icy mountain stream. If you focus on the cool tingly numbness instead of the pain, you learn to filter the hurt out.
Another technique is distraction. You can focus on sensations in some other part of your body, and therefore reduce the attention you're paying to the pain.
How often do you have to self-hypnotize to maintain pain relief?
I encourage my patients to do it for two to three minutes every one to three hours if they've got pain, and then anytime the pain starts to get worse. So it is a technique you can carry with you anywhere and use when you need it.
Has the effect of hypnosis on pain been studied?
There is really solid evidence that self-hypnosis is helpful. We did a trial some years ago for women with metastatic breast cancer that showed that teaching self-hypnosis resulted in a significant reduction in pain compared to patients who were not taught self-hypnosis.
