Pre-surgery Hypnosis Aids Breast Cancer Patients

A 15 minute hypnosis session before scheduled breast cancer surgery eased women of associated side effects like, post-surgical pain, nausea, and fatigue and also lowered intra-operative anesthesia and analgesic use thereby making the procedure more cost effective, a team of U.S. researchers has revealed.

The elaborate study conducted at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York looks into how well women cope with the surgery and its post surgical side effects after they go through a 15-minute session with a psychologist.

The results of the study are published in the online edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, August 28.

As defined in medicine, Hypnosis is a process in which critical thinking faculties of the mind are bypassed and a type of selective thinking and perception is established.

For the study, the research team led by Guy Montgomery, lead author of the report and associate professor in the department of oncological sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City randomly assigned 200 patients who were scheduled to undergo breast cancer surgery to a 15-minute pre-surgery hypnosis session conducted by a psychologist or a nondirective placebo.

At the end of the study researchers noticed a significant impact on the health of women who underwent the hypnosis session.

Patients in the hypnosis group scored better on the 1-100 point scale and reported less post operative pain, nausea, and fatigue than patients in the other group. They also reported an overall better emotional well being.

Hypnotized women required lesser dosage of intra-operative anesthesia and analgesics.

Furthermore, the surgical time reduced by 11 minutes for the hypnosis group patients, thereby lowering the procedure cost by $772.71 per patient.

Hoping the results of the study promote wider use of hypnosis in medical treatments, Montgomery said, "The present brief hypnosis intervention appears to be one of the rare clinical interventions that can simultaneously reduce both symptom burden and costs."

"Together, the combination of potential improvements in symptom burden for the hundreds of thousands of women facing breast cancer surgery each year and the economic benefit for institutions argues persuasively for the more widespread application of brief pre-surgical hypnosis,” Montgomery advocated.