Teaching self-hypnosis to patients with chronic pain.

For the past twenty years hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis have been utilized as valid tools for the successful management of severe protracted pain. Control often has been achieved in cases where other modalities of pain management had been inadequate. Hypnosis properly applied can bring some degree of improvement to 90 percent of patients. More remarkable degree of pain relief is achievable in the 25 percent of patients who have high hypnotic "talent," and with very limited expenditure of time and effort. The author discusses basic theories of pain, pain-control pain-control and hypnosis, and he clarifies the effects of physiological, biochemical, and psychological variables which can affect the procedures and the results. Presentation of a clinical case with quoted excerpts of verbalization serves to illustrate the most important points.