Hypnotherapy for chronic illness

When it comes to treating acute medical conditions, modern medicine is very effective. If you’ve broken a bone, or if you’re bleeding, you‘d be well advised to seek medical help as quickly as possible. Visiting a hypnotherapist in this situation would probably be a bad idea. Hypnotherapists deal with the non-physical and they leave the physical stuff to the physicians.

When it comes to acute conditions, medicine has learned to look for the cause of the problem and to deal with it quickly. If the cause happens to be an incision in your body that’s bleeding profusely, physicians act swiftly to rectify the problem where it has been created. They will apply direct pressure to the wound in order to stop the bleeding. This approach of dealing with the cause has led to wonderful success that has saved many lives.

When it comes to chronic conditions, medicine can be less effective. For whatever reason, medicine generally seems to prefer to treat the symptoms rather than the causes of chronic illness. This approach to chronic illness is also expensive. Looking after the 15.4 million people in England with at least one long-term condition takes up 70% of the NHS's £110bn budget. Experts agree that the costs are so huge that the NHS could become unsustainable unless it gives those with long-term conditions better care.

Hypnotherapists have long recognised that chronic stress can lead to chronic illness and most physicians will agree with this. Stress weakens the natural immune function and chronic stress weakens it chronically. A weak immune function does not contribute positively to abundant, glowing health. Being habitually relaxed does contribute to a strong natural immune function which promotes health. Hypnotherapy is synonymous with relaxation and it's very difficult to feel stressed when you’re feeling relaxed.

Hypnotherapy can help clients to locate the specific thoughts that cause their chronic stress. Hypnotherapy can then address these threatening thoughts so they’re seen in a more positive light and become non-threatening. If a thought isn’t threatening, it won’t produce a stress response and as such it won’t tax the immune function. Thoughts are non-physical, and unlike physicians who are great at dealing with physical conditions, hypnotherapists are experts at dealing with unhealthy thoughts.

Perhaps in the future our society will insist that the NHS pays for hypnotherapy. By addressing the cause of stress, a portion of our society could be spared from much pain and as an added bonus, we could also save a lot of money. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the need is growing.