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| Welcome | How it feels | What We Treat | Stress | Anxiety | Pain | Cancer |
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Pain Pain is many things. It is more often than not a warning that something is amiss. For example, pain would be useful if you hadn’t noticed that you have dropped a brick on your foot! Pain warns you when there is something internal which needs prompt attention like appendicitis which (unlike dropping a brick on your foot!) you cannot see. Pain can, however, be useful in different ways: (Please note: all the patients I shall mention received a full investigation from their GP and usually hospital consultants before being referred to me) It can be useful as in the old lady who had been moved to an isolated block of high rise flats with nothing but a blank wall to look at, and a broken lift. She had no friends left and was virtually a prisoner in her cramped dismal home. No matter what we did for her, she found an excuse to come back again with a different ailment. Her monthly visit to the pain clinic was just about her only journey out of her prison. Pain was the answer to her problem. The production of an abdominal pain every night by a young Roman Catholic lady turned out to be only way to prevent her having a fourth child. Pain can be the after effect of a problem. The patient can have had a problem and received a warning. The problem was dealt with, but no one remembered to tell the subconscious mind to turn off the alarm. A pain can reflect the patient’s feelings or situation and manifest itself in a corresponding part of the body. For example, the man who had a pain in the stomach every morning on the way to work; in hypno-analysis, it transpired that he had trouble at work which he just couldn’t stomach. Similarly a man whom the Dermatology Dept could not cure came to see me with severe skin problems in his hands. He had been promoted a little while ago but couldn’t handle it. An elderly lady had sore red painful eyes – she was finding it very difficult to get her family to ‘see’ things her way. Once diagnosed Cancer pain can often be eased, as it no longer serves any useful purpose, you know if you have got it, so there is no point in being reminded of it. An elderly war veteran arrived with aid of two walking sticks suffering from very painful arthritic knees. In hypnosis he was able to picture himself actually going down inside his knee with his tool kit and describe the condition as red, rough and inflamed. He was encouraged to find a way to alleviate the condition and told me how he was filing down then sandpapering the surface. He then tried it out in his mind but declared it was still very uncomfortable to move. A suggestion was given that he should search for blocked lubrication ducts, which he found and broddled then with a bradawl. He pronounced things ‘champion’ on retesting. Two weeks later he returned with only one stick, and thereafter without either, and was back climbing church belfries and ringing church bells. In Hypnosis stress release is of course is the first port of call, as pain travels rather like sound, and if you imagine a very taught, tight violin string being twanged, you get a very high tone, but as you slacken it off it gets lower and lower till the is no sound at all. The same applies to stress. We use techniques to decrease the tension. It is also very important to gain approval to reduce pain from the subconscious mind and also to install a pain early warning system. There are so many different approaches which I take, perfected during five years as the Consulting Hypnotherapist at Leeds General Infirmary’s Pain Clinic. They are explained in the first therapy session.
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