ABSTRACT
Although acute pain is critical to survival, chronic pain is not. It results in needless suffering and often contributes to other negative health conditions including insomnia, depression, and disability. Many of the most common treatments for chronic pain, including opioid analgesics and invasive medical procedures, can result in short-term pain relief, but often result in longer-term harms. Hypnosis treatment is a viable alternative to pharmacological and invasive biomedical treatments. Given its proven efficacy and positive side effect profile, it should probably be the first treatment offered to individuals with chronic pain. This chapter presents key information needed to be able to provide hypnosis treatment for chronic pain in adults. It begins with a discussion of four key research findings that inform the use of clinical hypnosis: (1) treatment outcome is variable, (2) hypnosis treatment has two primary benefits, so both should be targeted for treatment, (3) hypnosis treatment has many benefits in addition to pain reduction, and (4) using hypnosis to change pain-related thoughts appears to have greater benefit than using hypnosis to change pain intensity or quality. The chapter ends with a detailed treatment protocol developed based on decades of research for providing hypnosis treatment for pain management.
