Tooley Transformation - Hypnosis and Burn Treatment

Few examples of hypnotic healing are as dramatic as those that come from treating burns. Dabney Ewin, MD, a clinical professor of surgery and psychiatry at Tulane University School of Medicine, hypnotizes burn victims in the emergency room. Ewin's published case studies include a restaurant worker who burned his arm up to his elbow in a 370°F deep-fat fryer. The doctor induced a deep trance within 4 hours of the accident and provided hypnotic suggestion--"all your injured areas are cool and comfortable"--to the victim.

Ewin and others have shown that such care can slow or even stop the inflammation and blistering that can cause permanent damage. In the worker's case, the injury healed in 17 days with relatively little scarring. Ewin uses a series of slides to show examples of burns in which early intervention prevented serious, lifelong injuries.

Easing Pain

Work with burn victims demonstrates another benefit of hypnosis: It's an astoundingly powerful pain reliever, says David Patterson, PhD, chief psychologist at the University of Washington's Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, who co-published an extensive review of the topic in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin in 2003. "Hypnosis seems to be useful for virtually every clinical pain problem imaginable," he says.

One of the biggest risks after a severe burn is infection, which can lead to scarring, amputation, or even death. To prevent that, nurses at burn units have to remove patients' dead skin every day for several weeks, even months, in a process called debridement. The pain is so severe, it can cause more anguish than the original burn. To ease it, patients are given morphine and other powerful pain relievers, but those drugs can be habit forming and can cause confusion, gastrointestinal upset, and breathing trouble.

At Seattle's Harborview Medical Center, Patterson has been using hypnosis for 20 years to make that pain bearable. His team of 10 psychologists teaches the most severely burned patients, who appear to benefit most from hypnosis, how to induce a state of relaxation and comfort. The session includes an instruction--called a posthypnotic suggestion--that cues the patient to feel the same level of comfort days, weeks, or even months later. A simple touch on the shoulder by a nurse, for example, if suggested in the original session, can trigger a trance, enabling a patient to undergo wound care without pain.

"Hypnosis is very well suited for burn pain treatment," says Patterson, "because the pain is intense but short lived, and you know when it's going to happen."

Reproduced here from The Healing Power of Hypnosis by Alexis Jetter, PREVENTION, March 2006

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