First, let's start with a common sense message. Before embarking on hypnotic work on pain, you must first have made all the necessary medical appointments. This is because pain is a signal that one part of us is sending to another part of us. And finally the intensity of the pain corresponds to the strength of this signal. The first thing to do when you have pain is therefore to see a doctor who will use this information to form a diagnosis. There is therefore no question of reducing pain by hypnosis before the doctor has had the opportunity to make a diagnosis for fear of distorting it.

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Thus no work on pain will begin without the explicit agreement of the doctor who follows the patient. He will therefore be aware of the process and therefore if the patient no longer has pain following the use of hypnosis, he will also know that this does not necessarily mean that he is cured.

Indeed, and this is the great bad news, hypnosis is not going to cure, on the other hand it is a tool which will make it possible to modify the perception of pain, thus a pain which was perceived as being very high (9 in 10 for example) may be felt as a simple gene (1 in 10).
Such a result will not be obtained without work.

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"This is about learning to play with your brain as some have learned to play an instrument"

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This will require several hypnotherapy sessions (between 4 and 6) and especially personal work (around 10 to 20 minutes per day for 3 to 6 months). This is about learning to play with your brain as some have learned to play an instrument and therefore you will have to start by doing your scales.

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There is a tendency to classify pain into two broad categories based on their presumed origins  : pains of physical origin and pains of psychological origin (called psychosomatic). Perhaps this eagerness to categorize pain in this way comes from our Cartesian culture, or simply from our brain's difficulty in dealing with uncertainty. Anyway, this categorization seems to me from my experience, rather artificial.

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First of all, medicine is a science that is being built day by day and many ailments that are diagnosable today were not even 10 or 20 years ago. It would therefore be more accurate to say "  pain that doctors can determine to be physical  " and "  pain for which doctors are unable (perhaps not yet) to determine a physical origin  ".

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Then the patients who came to see me almost all had multiple origins. Indeed, the body and the mind being intimately linked, pain is rarely confined only to the body. So almost all the patients who came to see me with chronic pain diagnosed as physical (a herniated disc for example) very often felt because of this pain emotions such as a feeling of injustice, anger or even sadness and even depression. And obviously, these emotions have an impact on the perception of pain.  : it is less painful on a beach with family and friends than all alone in a cellar brooding over the injustice of which we are the victim.

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And conversely, patients diagnosed as psychosomatic and who experience pain 9 out of 10 in the neck for example, this feeling will push them to tense their muscles, to take unnatural analgesic postures and therefore generate inflammation of the muscles and ligaments. which will have nothing psychosomatic.

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This is why in hypnosis to learn to manage pain, we will learn self-hypnosis techniques to reduce the perception of pain but we will also work on the emotions that are linked to this pain (whether they are the pain). cause or consequence).

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I am often asked what type of pain hypnosis can be effective on. Until proven otherwise, hypnosis can modify the perception of any type of pain, because if the pain is different, they are all felt in the same pain circuits of the brain. Personally, the most common pains on which I have used hypnosis are back pain, neuralgic pain (sciatica for example), migraines, stomach aches (irritable bowel syndrome type) and pain articular (osteoarthritis type for example).

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For those who wish, every month at the Parisian Institute of the Back, I organize a Hypnosis and Pain workshop in order to address these themes, to discuss and to begin to discover this tool that is hypnosis and what he can bring.