University Targets Children’s Seizures With Hypnosis
Stanford University’s Lucile Parkard’s Hospital have been using hypnosis to avoid months and possibly even years of wasted time when diagnosing children’s seizures and prescribing drugs.
Physicians used hypnosis to check the diagnosis. When diagnosing seizures, it can be difficult to establish the areas of the brain that cause the seizure. Previously, that has meant monitoring the child, whilst hooked up to monitors, and then waiting for days at a time hoping that the child would have a seizure whilst in the hospital. The waiting can be very traumatic for both the child and their family. Another consideration is that the child is in hospital, away from the factors that may be causing or contributing to the onset of the seizures so they may not even be able to have a seizure in hospital.
To combat this problem, the physicians were able to hypnotise the children. Children are usually much easier to hypnotise than adults because their imagination is much more active and impressionable. In hypnosis, the doctors were able to induce a seizure by asking the child to simply imagine they were going through a seizure.
Whilst under hypnosis, the brain activity can be monitored and this tells the physicians whether seizures are epileptic and need drugs, or non-epileptic, needing psychological or neurological treatment. In a trial of nine children, the hypnotherapist was able to induce a seizure in eight cases, confirming the diagnosis.
When the children were experiencing non-epileptic seizures, a combination of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and hypnotherapy was used to allow the children to recognise the causal factors and use self-hypnosis to ‘turn off’ their reactions thus preventing a seizure.
The hospital found that although many parents and families were initially sceptical of hypnosis, they soon realised the benefits.
You can read the complete article from Medical News Today
