Painkilling

[aoeud]

Hello, mind warpers (dunno if you use that term but it seems appropriate!)

I've been using hypnosis for relaxation for a few months now but I apparently lost hope of accomplishing my original goal of blocking spinal pain. A couple of years ago I broke my back, and it healed wrong. It can't be made any worse no matter what I do (barring breaking it again), so I'm looking into ways of blocking the pain so I can get on with my life.

Anyhow. I want to make an mp3 about 25 minutes long that will induct me, help with the pain, and then wake me.

I have no idea where to begin. Any advice?

PS: I am looking into accessing a professional hypnotherapist but it's looking like that will take a long time and I'm at risk of failing out of university if I can't be more active than my current situation allows.

[VeryGnawty]

Blocking pain is really a meditation technique more than anything. It is all about state of mind.

[Ladon]

IIRC, dental hypnosis used to be very common. You might look for a dentist trained in such a method. I saw an ad in the phone book here lately, but YMMV.

[DKaiser]

First off, though it may seem old fashioned, some hypnotherapists do advertise in the Yellow Pages, so check that(or your local equivalent business phone book) for your area.

I'm open to working with you on using one-on-one or file based hypnotherapy for it, though in the sake of full disclosure, I'm not licensed in my state for such things(took the class, but they want a college degree in a relevant field to be licensed), so if you're really wanting a Certified Hypnotist, you're better off looking locally. In general, though, the suggestion setup is to work on removing how the pain is overly distracting/harming to your mood rather than removing the pain sensations themselves(look up Congenital Pain Insensitivity for examples of how being immune to pain comes with a lot of bad issues).

As for non-hypnosis based approaches, some psychiatrists deal with chronic pain, and a doctor would be more than happy to throw pills at it given proper medical documentation of your back issues(which should be easy to produce, given how serious such an issue is).

Feel free to ask any questions you might still have, I'm just answering what I can think of off the top of my head here.

[aoeud]

Blocking pain is really a meditation technique more than anything. It is all about state of mind.

I had looked into meditation for pain relief but the studies I found indicated that most methods led to about a 1/3 reduction in pain, and that's not enough. Looking into hypnosis, in some cases the pain could be blocked completely.

As for dental hypnosis, it's a good idea I think, but two things come to mind: they probably don't want to do pain not related to dentistry, and they probably are focused on acute rather than chronic pain.

As for Yellow Pages hypnotists, I run into the problem of wait times (ETA of relief = 10-14 sessions and scheduling could make that take a very long time) and not knowing whether they're any good. There is one hypnotherapist organization here, but they haven't responded to my request. My doctor is also looking for psychiatrists who do it but I've had no response there either.

I don't mind how it's done as long as I can function better, whether it's blocking pain or not being distressed by it. General pain insensitivity I know is a bad thing, but I'm hoping I can target the fracture-related pain in particular. As I said, I cannot make it worse so blocking the pain completely has no disadvantage.

As for painkillers, I'm on a (chronically) toxic dose of a drug with a drowsy side effect that hurts my performance in school, and I take a second one that's not bad at all. I want to get off the first, but don't mind if I have to take the second. Even taking all that and restricting my activities greatly I still run into 9-10/10 pain levels from time to time, and have had to skip classes in order to lie down.

I would very much appreciate your help, DKaiser. I like the idea of file hypnotherapy very much because I can use it when I want, and it would be nice to be part of the process. One thing I run into with medical professionals and the like is that they don't much value my input which can be very frustrating.