Verified by 
Key points
- A new study finds that molecular testing can show how hypnotisable you are.
- Hypnotherapy can be excellent for pain control.
- The more hypnotisable you are, the more effective it could be for pain control.
Hypnotherapy has an excellent track record in helping with pain control, including for surgery. In fact, before the advent of anesthesia, it was either hypnosis or a large bottle of something 70 proof and a very big stick to bite on. But, for many reasons, too few people are keen to try it as their method of pain control. However, science has come up with a molecular test to determine just how effective pain relief via hypnotherapy could be for you.
Some people are more hypnotisable than others, but finding out who is and who isn’t and how much by, can be tricky. Testing requires special training—until now. In a study, published in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, researchers developed a super-fast, point-of-care molecular diagnostic test that can identify those people who would most like likely benefit from hypnosis as part of their pain treatment plan.1
The Science Behind the Test
The study involved inexpensive genotyping of four single-nucleotide polymorphisms in the catechol-o-methyltransferase (COMT) gene using giant magnetoresistive biosensors.
Previous research had already established that a genetic basis for hypnotisability included four specific single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPS), or genetic variations, found in the COMT gene.
“Since hypnotisability is a stable cognitive trait with a genetic basis, our goal was to create a molecular diagnostic tool for objectively identifying individuals who would benefit from hypnosis by determining ‘treatability’ at the point-of-care,” said co-lead Dana L. Cortade, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the School of Engineering at Stanford University.
According to the study, with those people who had the proposed COMT genotypes, 89.5 percent scored highly on the Hypnotic Induction Profile (an assessment of a person’s level of trait hypnotisability and their potential to experience a hypnotic state).
The molecular test certainly beats more traditional hypnotisability methods such as imagining that your hands are stuck together and that you can’t pull them apart or pretending that you are sucking on a lemon just to see how watery your mouth will get.
In addition, the study found that a subset of these highly hypnotisable participants could also be susceptible to higher levels of postoperative pain. But that’s OK because hypnotherapy can help there, too.
Pain Control
I worked for 10 years in a National Health Services Trust hospital setting helping people manage the pain (and its associated emotional and behavioural issues) caused by a condition known as cardiac syndrome X (CSX). It is often described as chest pain in the absence of any coronary abnormalities. CSX can be a debilitating condition for some. As a result of that, pain control with hypnotherapy became something of a specialist area for me. It can help with all sorts of pain recovery, including tension headaches, migraine, fibromyalgia, and even cancer care.
Another recent study (so recent that it is yet to be published) found that hypnosis helped breast cancer patients cope better with their surgery and subsequent recovery. Other studies have shown that people who score highly for resilience and optimism have a better recovery experience than those who don’t. So, this study used hypnotherapy to boost both.
“It has been well documented through research that hypnosis before surgery can reduce pain,” said Professor Silje Endresen Reme, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo. “We are also trying to influence psychological resilience. If you tell the brain that everything will go well during surgery, it can be a kind of antidote against catastrophic thoughts.”
Hypnotherapy for surgery, however, has been used in one form or another since at least the 1800s. The famous Scottish surgeon James Braid (1795–1860) was a pioneer of the protocol.
These days, what holds most people back from utilising it as a safe pain-control method for all sorts of conditions, including before and after surgery, are the many misconceptions about it that still abound.
References
