Hypnosis Helps With Mastectomy Discomfort
While acupuncture has been found to be highly effective post-surgically to repair wounds, Hypnosis can of great help pre-surgery. Hypnosis has proven to be effective in lessening the trauma of surgery, by helping patients reduce their stress levels. Stress causes muscles to tighten. And when muscles tighten, the veins contract with them, trapping toxins in the blood. Arterial blood gets trapped and is unable to provide oxygen to the heart. Lymph fluid gets trapped, thereby lowering the immune system. So just as stress can damage a patient going into surgery, reducing its levels are of great benefit to the patient.
The proof that hypnosis is beneficial is in the ledger sheets: Hypnosis has been shown to reduce post-surgical costs by an average of nearly $800.00 per client. I have begun doing hypnopuncture with patients who are going into surgery and getting wonderful results with it.
Here are two studies wherein hypnosis was used with women about to get mastectomies.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/18227298/?i=2&from=/11778705/related
“Postintervention, and before surgery, patients in the hypnosis group had significantly lower mean values for presurgery VAS emotional upset (16.5 vs 38.2, P < 0.0001, d = .85), VAS depressed mood (6.6 vs 19.9, P < 0.02, d = .67), and SV-POMS anxiety (10.0 vs 5.0, P < 0.0001, d = 0.85); and significantly higher levels for VAS relaxation (75.7 vs 54.2, P < 0.001, d = -0.76) than attention controls.
CONCLUSIONS: The study results indicate that a brief presurgery hypnosis intervention can be an effective means of controlling presurgical distress in women awaiting diagnostic breast cancer surgery.”