Some hospitals try it

The Washington Post, by Debra Bruno, November 9, 2019: “Hypnotherapy — also called clinical hypnosis or hypnosurgery — has been used in Europe for minimally invasive procedures, such as hernia repair, lumpectomies, biopsies and some mastectomies in breast cancers for several decades. But in the United States, hospitals and doctors have shied away from the therapy.

Girish Joshi, an anesthesiologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who has studied, with European colleagues, using virtual reality in hypnosis, says that, in contrast to a quick injection, hypnosis takes time to implement, the response rate can be slower and the U.S. payment system is not geared to alternative medicine.

Now, however, some U.S. hospitals are offering hypnosis to patients to lessen preoperative anxiety, to manage postoperative pain and even to substitute for general anesthesia for partial mastectomies in breast cancer. (Hypnosis has been used for years to help people quit smoking, lose weight, get to sleep and control stress.)

Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center, for instance, started using hypnotherapy about two years ago for segmental (partial) mastectomies and sentinel node biopsies, in which doctors identify and remove a lymph node in the underarm area as well as cancerous tumors in the breast, says staff anesthesiologist Elizabeth Rebello, who is also an associate professor in anesthesiology at MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.”

Read: Hypnotherapy isn’t magic, but it helps some patients cope with surgery and recovery