Hypnotherapy

Sheffield Based, Nationally Registered Hypnotherapist.
Location: Sheffield city centre, served by tram and bus. 7 minute walk from train station.

Physical Pain

Pain can seriously impair a person's quality of life, preventing enjoyment of many acitivities that people free from pain, take for granted. It can seriously affect sleep and mobility and continued pain can gradually lead to feelings of hopelessness.

Physical pain frequently has an organic cause such as tissue or organ damage, muscular strain or infection such as a tooth abscess. Where no detectable tissue damage exists, the discomfort is attributed to psychological factors and described as psychogenic pain.

There are 3 main syndromes of pain where no detectable tissue damage exists:

  • Neuralgia: repetitive, intense, stabbing pain, along the route of a nerve.
  • Causalgia: repetitive, occurences of burning sensations at the site of an original (but since healed) area of the body.
  • Phantom Limb Pain: pain described as burning and cramp-like in the limb that has been amputated through surgery.

Pain is a subjective experience. All pain experiences involve a complex interaction of both psychological and physiological factors.

  • Acute pain is where a person experiences short bouts of pain, occasionally, lasting no more than 6 months.
  • Chronic pain is where a person experiences frequent pain, or worse, continuous pain, lasting longer than a period of 6 months.

The Gate Control Theory of pain proposes that neural signals of pain pass through a metaphorical gate that can modulate the signals before they reach the brain. This means that pain signals can be interrupted and and influenced by psychological processes making hypnotherapy tremendously effective.

The cognitive processes have been studied in dental patients. Patients were studied before, during and after dental pain linked to dental procedures. It was established that high anxiety patients' memories of pain were based more on what they anticipated than what they actually experienced.

Other than back pain, headaches are the most common source of pain and many people suffer chronic pain from intense headaches. The 3 most common types of headache are:

  • Tension related. This can feel like a tight band of pressure around the head. This is caused by persistent contraction of the head and neck muscles combined with a central nervous dysfunction.
  • Migraine. These are much more common in women and seem to peak at middle age and then decline. Pain is caused by sustained dilation of blood vessels surrounding the brain. Migraines are often associated with visual disturbances and feelings of nausea.
  • Sinusitis related. Often described as dull and throbbing, this pain can be caused when the paranasal sinuses become blocked, inflammed or infected.There can be additional pain in the cheeks and jaw.

All headaches are disabling. Tension and migraine headaches frequently occur after a period of stress.

Hypnosis has an impressive history of talented surgeons who used hypnosis with patients undergoing surgery. James Esdalie was born in 1808 and built on the work done by John Elliotson (1791 - 1868) a brilliant physician who testified excellent results for hypnosis in a wide range of ailments ranging from neurological disorders to heart problems, convulsions and inflammations.

James Esdalie studied in Edinburgh and worked on thousands of painless operations with the use of hypnosis. It was said of James Esdalie that no one person had worked more diligently to bring the value of hypnotic analgesia and anaesthesia to the attention of the medical profession. The British Medical Association reported in 1891 that:

"As a therapeutic agent, hypnotism is frequently effective in relieving pain, procuring sleep and alleviating many functional ailments."

Hypnotherapy utilises the power of hypnosis in conjunction with a set of interventions based on your particular experience of pain. Once you have explained the history of your pain, your current life-style and any medical treatments, I can develop a strategy particularly for you. This strategy will give you techniques to interrupt the psychological processes that reinforce physical pain and will enable you to manage your physiological symptoms so that you can enjoy a more fulfilling life.

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Professional Hypnotherapy. Nationally registered Hypnotherapist. 54 Campo Lane, Sheffield. S1 2EG.