Hypnosis for pain management in the older adult

Pain is a physical, emotional and psychologic phenomenon that is often ignored in older adults causing depression and poor quality of life. Older adults report the use of complementary and alternative medicine in some form with 80% of these users reporting improvement in their health conditions. Although physical pain in the older adult is usually managed with pharmacologic interventions, methods that may reduce the use of prescription drugs may decrease adverse effects that can compromise the physiologic state of the older adult. Hypnosis has continued to gain acceptance within mainstream medicine as an appropriate treatment and can be integrated safely with conventional medicine as an effective treatment for a variety of conditions in the older adult. It is an intervention that can be used for relaxation and pain control, especially when conventional pharmacologic regimens have failed. The purpose of this article is to review the concepts related to pain in older adults; the use of complementary and alternative medicine in the older adult; hypnosis and the older adult (i.e., background, definition, benefits, research, mechanism of action, hypnotizability, and the process); and the implications of using hypnosis for pain management in the older adult.

University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19002, USA. ncuellar@nursing.upenn.edu