Making Clinical Hypnosis a Mainstream Component of Healthcare For Physical Problems: Perspective and Lessons from 25 Years in GI Hypnosis

1:00-2:00 PM PDT Keynote

Making Clinical Hypnosis a Mainstream Component of Healthcare For Physical Problems: Perspective and Lessons from 25 Years in GI Hypnosis

Olafur Palsson, PsyD, Professor of Medicine, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

1 CE

Hypnosis is perhaps the most powerful psychological tool known to humankind for directly influencing physical symptoms, but it is extraordinarily under-utilized for that purpose. It remains a rarely used exotic intervention technique for most medical problems. A notable exception is the treatment of functional gastrointestinal disorders, where clinical hypnosis has become a recommended option for patients with certain characteristics in standard clinical treatment algorithms and guidelines, and is supported as effective by multiple systematic reviews in leading journals in the field.

Evidence-based hypnosis treatment for gastrointestinal problems is now practiced in most of the top U.S. GI specialty centers, and also offered by hundreds of therapists in the community across the nation and internationally. Reaching this level of mainstream utilization has been a long and meandering path for GI hypnosis. It is vital for the future success of hypnosis as a clinical tool for medical problems to achieve similar mainstream integration for other major health problems where it has shown therapeutic promise. In this presentation, Dr. Palsson will summarize key lessons from GI hypnosis regarding how this can be brought about, and will discuss how it could be achieved much faster in the future. In the process, he will also give the audience insights into how clinicians can best achieve reliable therapeutic impact on physical disorders with hypnosis.

Learning Outcomes:

• Outline the main steps required for integration of clinical hypnosis into mainstream healthcare.

• Summarize the current status of hypnosis treatment for gastrointestinal disorders. • Name at least three ways to make a hypnosis intervention reliably effective for treatment of a physical disorder.