Clinical applications of self-hypnosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

Abstract

We conducted a systematic review of randomized control trials examining the efficacy of self-hypnosis as a clinical treatment. Searching for 'self-hypnosis', 'selfhypnotic', 'autosuggestion', and 'autohypnosis' returned 576 studies, of which 22 met the definition of being an RCT. Self-hypnosis has been reported to be efficacious in studies of pain, childbirth, paediatric applications, stress and anxiety. Methodological differences among studies are discussed. Self-hypnosis is most likely to be effective when taught as an independent self-directed skill and when it involves at least three practice sessions before participation in the trial. Experience of heterohypnosis does not seem to be essential in producing an effect for self-hypnosis. Studies reporting no effect typically involved participants listening to audio recordings of hetero-hypnosis only. Meta-analysis revealed a medium-to-large effect size for self-hypnosis in clinical treatment.

Hypnosis for Clinical Pain Management: A Scoping Review of Systematic Reviews

“…We did not identify any new articles with our second search performed on December 31, 2019. Thus, we included a total of 13 systematic reviews or meta-analyses that synthesized results from 99 RCTs or non-randomized clinical trials published from 1841 to 2017 that evaluated the effects of hypnosis on pain [15][16][17][18][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. There were overlapping trials between reviews: overall, there were 77 unique trials that included data from more than 6,882 participants (one review did not report sample sizes [33]).…”

“…Five of the reviews summarized in this paper reviewed the effects of hypnosis on procedural pain [18,28,29,34,35], four reviewed studies examining the effects of hypnosis on chronic pain [16,32,33,36], and four reviewed trials that examined the effects of hypnosis on other pain conditions [15,17,30,31]. However, the authors of one of the reviews that sought to evaluate the effects of hypnosis on end-of-life cancer pain were unable to find any trials to review that met their inclusion criteria [31].…”

“…This review noted whether or not the treatment providers were trained. The frequency of hypnosis sessions ranged from just one session (most often in studies evaluating the effects of hypnosis for medical procedure-related pain; [17,18,[34][35][36] to as many as fourteen sessions for treatment of chronic conditions such as fibromyalgia [32] and forty-eight sessions for ongoing breast cancer care [29]. A similar variation was also seen in the duration of individual sessions, which varied from 10 minutes [18,35] to 2 hours [32].…”

“…Based on the information provided in the thirteen reviews, thirty-eight trials examined the effects of self-hypnosis using audio recordings, most often (but not always) after one or more face-to-face hypnosis sessions [15-17, 28, 29, 33, 35, 36]. Five unique trials included in three reviews used audio recordings to teach hypnosis without any face-to-face sessions [17,18,35]. Although most trials provided hypnosis treatment to individual patients, the reviewers also reported on some trials that used group therapy for teaching hypnosis [15,29,36].…”

“…A large and growing number of clinical trials have been conducted to evaluate the efficacy of hypnosis for pain management. Moreover, reviews of these trials -including both systematic reviews and meta-analyses (which are considered as providing the highest level of evidence)have also been published [15][16][17][18]. A useful next step would be to perform a review of these reviews in order to summarize the current state of the evidence regarding the overall efficacy of hypnosis for clinical pain, which in turn could potentially inform future research and the clinical application of hypnosis and hypnotic procedures.…”