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Self-Hypnosis Can Help Take the Pain Out of Operations

April 28, 2000 -- "Robert" had undergone more medical procedures than he could count on both hands, and that was just in the last two years.

He has liver disease and has a plastic tube inserted in his bile duct. The tube regularly gets clogged, meaning more trips to the hospital, where the tube is cleaned out or replaced. It's a painful procedure, made more painful because of Robert's anxiety. But before one of these procedures, his doctor asked him if he wanted to try something new: self-hypnosis. It just might lessen the pain, she told him.

She told him to lean back, breathe, and focus on floating away to someplace safe and comfortable. She kept repeating these directions while she and her assistants worked to replace the plastic tube. She kept repeating them while the anesthesiologist monitored Robert's vital signs and asked if he was feeling any pain.

When it was over, Robert (not his real name) was a convert. Never again, he said, would he undergo a procedure without using self-hypnosis. He was so impressed with the process that he asked the doctor for a copy of the script she used for the self-hypnosis, so he could take it home and use it with his wife when they argue. "He says they will use it to calm down," says one of his doctors, Elvira Lang, MD, an associate professor of radiology and medicine at Harvard Medical School.

At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where Lang is director of cardiovascular interventional radiology, patients are regularly offered the option of using self-hypnosis as a booster to traditional painkillers and sedatives during some types of operations. In a study of the technique, published in the medical journal Lancet, she and colleagues found that hypnosis had a positive effect.

In the study, Lang compared patients who used self-hypnosis or a similar method called structured attention technique, along with pain-killing drugs, to patients who received drugs alone. The patients who underwent self-hypnosis experienced less pain and anxiety. Importantly, doctors spent less time completing the procedures in these patients, and less time meant less cost, about $100 a patient less.

Lang and her colleagues divided the nearly 250 patients they studied into three groups: Some got standard care, some used structured attention techniques, and others did self-hypnosis. All the patients were having operations to open blocked arteries or ducts.

"Self-hypnotic relaxation saved 17 minutes of [operating room] time, despite the time invested in the hypnotic induction compared with standard care," she writes. The structured attention technique shaved an average of 11 minutes off of the time it took for the procedures.

Lang tells WebMD that "it only takes about five minutes to induce the relaxed or self-hypnotic state in the patients." The standard script she uses asks patients to "close their eyes, breathe, and then concentrate on the sensation of floating. While focusing on the sensation of floating, I tell them to transport themselves to someplace safe and comfortable." She says that it can be a familiar place -- "one woman goes to her kitchen and cans vegetables" -- or it may be an exotic setting that the patient has only read about.