Hypnosis Before Diagnostic or Therapeutic Medical Procedures:A Systematic Review

Abstract

The aim of this systematic review was to estimate the efficiency of hypnosis prior to medical procedures. Different databases were analyzed to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing hypnosis to control interventions. All RCTs had to report pain or anxiety. Eighteen RCTs with a total of 968 patients were included; study size was from 20 to 200 patients (14 RCTs ≤ 60 patients). Fourteen RCTs included 830 adults and 4 RCTs included 138 children. Twelve of 18 RCTs had major quality limitations related to unclear allocation concealments, provider's experience in hypnosis, patient's adherence to hypnotic procedures, and intention-to-treat design. This systematic review observed major methodological limitations in RCTs on hypnosis prior to medical procedures.

The effectiveness of hypnotic analgesia in the management of procedural pain in minimally invasive procedures: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

“…Therefore, meta‐analyses were not performed in the present systematic review. The differences described were also found in previous systematic reviews of hypnosis for pain relief in diagnostic or medical procedures (Cheseaux, De Saint Lager, & Walder, ; Kendrick et al, ).…”

“…With the purpose of obtaining a more accurate estimate of the effect of hypnotic analgesia on pain and anxiety during invasive procedures, inclusion criteria with relation to the population and type of procedure or treatment were limited in this present systematic review compared to other recent reviews in the field (Cheseaux et al, ; Kendrick et al, ; Stoelb et al, ; Tefikow et al, ). We included adults, 18 years and older, who had undergone a minimally invasive procedure in a conscious sedation.…”

“…With the purpose of obtaining a more accurate estimate of the effect of hypnotic analgesia on pain and anxiety during invasive procedures, inclusion criteria with relation to the population and type of procedure or treatment were limited in this present systematic review compared to other recent reviews in the field (Cheseaux et al, 2014;Kendrick et al, 2016;Stoelb et al, 2009;Tefikow et al, 2013 & Hillegass, 2010). Although the inclusion criteria were restricted to minimally invasive procedures in this review, we could not perform meta-analyses on several outcomes as was originally planned in the protocol (Nørgaard & Pedersen, 2014).…”

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]).…”

“…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.…”