This article reviews controlled trials of hypnotic treatment for chronic pain in terms of: (1) analyses comparing the effects of hypnotic treatment to six types of control conditions; (2) component analyses; and (3) predictor analyses. The findings indicate that hypnotic analgesia produces significantly greater decreases in pain relative to no-treatment and to some non-hypnotic interventions such as medication management, physical therapy, and education/advice. However, the effects of self-hypnosis training on chronic pain tend to be similar, on average, to progressive muscle relaxation and autogenic training, both of which often include hypnotic-like suggestions. None of the published studies have compared hypnosis to an equally credible placebo or minimally effective pain treatment, therefore conclusions cannot yet be made about whether hypnotic analgesia treatment is specifically effective over and above its effects on patient expectancy. Component analyses indicate that labeling versus not labeling hypnosis treatment as hypnosis, or including versus not including hand-warming suggestions, have relatively little short-term impact on outcome, although the hypnosis label may have a long-term benefit. Predictor analyses suggest that global hypnotic responsivity and ability to experience vivid images are associated with treatment outcome in hypnosis, progressive relaxation, and autogenic training treatments. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for future hypnosis research and for the clinical applications of hypnotic analgesia.

Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington 98195-6490, USA. mjensen@u.washington.edu

Pregnancy presents many problems without working through additional problems in coping with an ostomy. Yet many women with an ostomy do get pregnant and do deliver healthy babies. Evidence-based nursing is of the utmost importance, as there is little published information on this topic. Because of the scarcity of pregnant subjects within the ostomy category, most studies, by necessity, select a purposive subject base. Therefore, other information sources regarding nursing management of the pregnant woman with an ostomy take on considerably more importance.This article explores other forms of evidence that can be used in managing the care of pregnant ostomy patients and specifically how nurses can integrate various sources of information in designing an evidence-based nursing care plan. Nonpharmacologic forms of relaxation therapy, easily used by nurses, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction, guided imagery, and hypnosis, are also identified as some ways nurses can relieve anxiety and experiential stress associated with pregnancy in women who have an ostomy.

Darlene Sredl, PhD, MA, MSN, RN, Clinical Assistant Professor, University of Missouri. Virginia Aukamp, PhD, MSN, RN, Supervisor of Nursing, St. Paul's Lutheran Church.

Nurses are in a key position to learn and use hypnosis with patients to reduce pain and enhance self-esteem. However, most nurses lack knowledge about the clinical effectiveness of hypnosis and may seek continuing education to become skilled in its use. Painful procedures, treatments, or diseases remain a major nursing challenge, and nurses need complementary ways to relieve pain from surgery, tumors, injuries, and chemotherapy. This article examines the evidence base related to hypnosis for pain management, as well as how to assess and educate patients about hypnosis.

Research and Education, Department of Veteran Affairs, Los Angeles, California, USA. sharon.valente@va.gov

The aim of this study was to systematically review and critically appraise the evidence on the effectiveness of hypnosis for procedure-related pain and distress in pediatric cancer patients. A comprehensive search of major biomedical and specialist complementary and alternative medicine databases was conducted. Citations were included from the databases' inception to March 2005. Efforts were made to identify unpublished and ongoing research. Controlled trials were appraised using predefined criteria. Clinical commentaries were obtained for each study. Seven randomized controlled clinical trials and one controlled clinical trial were found. Studies report positive results, including statistically significant reductions in pain and anxiety/distress, but a number of methodological limitations were identified. Systematic searching and appraisal has demonstrated that hypnosis has potential as a clinically valuable intervention for procedure-related pain and distress in pediatric cancer patients. Further research into the effectiveness and acceptability of hypnosis for pediatric cancer patients is recommended.

Faculty of Health and Social Work, Portland Square, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon PL4 8AA, United Kingdom. janet.richardson@plymouth.ac.uk

Painful menstruation is a cyclic painful condition that adversely affects the woman's wellbeing for a large part of her life. Its pathogenesis is not always understood. Prostaglandins seem to be intimately involved in primary dysmenorrhoea although it is difficult to understand the underlying cause for their excessive secretion. Abnormalities in plasma steroid levels could account for the disturbance, especially significantly elevated plasma levels of estradiol in the luteal phase. Plasma levels of vasopressin appear to be higher in women with dysmenorrhea suggesting a possible aetiological role in the uterine prostaglandin synthesis. The main aim of diagnosis is to distinguish those cases with secondary dysmenorrhoea due to endometriosis and chronic pelvic inflammatory disease and treat them accordingly although the exact role of endometriosis remains unclear. The development of sonographic and magnetic resonance imaging techniques (MRI) allow pre-operative diagnosis of adenomyosis, a difficult to diagnose cause of dysmenorrhea and pelvic pain. Medication is usually required for all cases of moderate to severe painful menstruation. Apart from pharmacological agents, several techniques have been used including relaxation therapy, hypnosis, manipulation, psychotherapy, acupuncture, biofeedback techniques, surgery e.g. Despite the high prevalence of painful menstruation, its frequency and severity is very often underestimated.

2nd Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece.

The effect of emotions on pain perception is generally recognized but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here, emotions related to pain were induced in healthy volunteers using hypnosis, during 1-min immersions of the hand in painfully hot water. In Experiment 1, hypnotic suggestions were designed to induce various positive or negative emotions. Compared to a control condition with hypnotic-relaxation, negative emotions produced robust increases in pain. In Experiment 2, induction of pain-related anger and sadness were found to increase pain. Pain increases were associated with increases in self-rated desire for relief and decreases in expectation of relief, and with increases in arousal, negative affective valence and decreases in perceived control. In Experiment 3, hypnotic suggestions specifically designed to increase and decrease the desire for relief produced increases and decreases in pain, respectively. In all three experiments, emotion-induced changes in pain were most consistently found on ratings of pain unpleasantness compared to pain intensity. Changes in pain-evoked cardiac responses (R-R interval decrease), measured in experiments 2 and 3, were consistent with changes in pain unpleasantness. Correlation and multiple regression analyses suggest that negative emotions and desire for relief influence primarily pain affect and that pain-evoked autonomic responses are strongly associated with pain affect. These results confirm the hypothesized influence of the desire for relief on pain perception, and particularly on pain affect, and support the functional relation between pain affect and autonomic nociceptive responses. This study provides further experimental confirmation that pain-related emotions influence pain perception and pain-related physiological responses.

Departement de Stomatologie, Faculte de medecine dentaire, Universite de Montreal, CP. 6128, Succ. Centre-ville, Montreal, Que., Canada H3C 1J7. pierre.rainville@umontreal.ca

Nowadays, there is compelling evidence that there is a poor relationship between the incoming sensory input and the resulting pain sensation. Signals coming from the peripheral nervous system undergo a complex modulation by cognitive, affective, and motivational processes when they enter the central nervous system. Placebo- and hypnosis-induced analgesia form two extreme examples of how cognitive processes may influence the pain sensation. With the advent of modern brain imaging techniques, researchers have started to disentangle the brain mechanisms involved in these forms of cognitive modulation of pain. These studies have shown that the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices form important structures in a descending pathway that modulates incoming sensory input, likely via activation of the endogenous pain modulatory structures in the midbrain periaqueductal gray. Although little is known about the receptor systems involved in hypnosis-induced analgesia, studies of the placebo response suggest that the opiodergic and dopaminergic systems play an important role in the mediation of the placebo response.

Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark.

The present study examined the facilitation of pain reduction through the use of a pain reduction protocol. The protocol emphasized converting pain sensations into visual and auditory representations, which then were manipulated through therapeutic suggestion. Hypnosis was not mentioned in the intervention, minimizing creation of expectancy effects related to hypnosis. At the conclusion of the study, the Stanford Clinical Hypnotic Scale was administered. Measures of relaxation and reduction of suffering were not related to hypnotizability. However, pain reduction was significantly related to hypnotizability (r = .55, P < .001). High hypnotizables had a greater reduction in pain than low hypnotizables, even though both had equivalent degrees of relaxation.

Psychology Service, National Rehabilitation Hospital, 102 Irving Street, NW, Washington, DC 20010, USA. philip.r.appel@medstar.net

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

Functional imaging studies have identified a matrix of structures in the brain that respond to noxious stimuli. Within this matrix, a division of function between sensory-discriminative and affective responses has so far been demonstrated by manipulating either pain intensity or unpleasantness under hypnosis in two different normal volunteer groups studied on separate occasions. Our study used positron emission tomography (PET) to demonstrate this division of function under more natural conditions in a healthy group of volunteers, using a CO(2) laser to provide nociceptive stimuli that selectively activate A-delta and C-fibres without contamination by touch sensations. We measured the differential cerebral responses to noxious and innocuous laser stimuli during conditions of selective attention to either the unpleasantness or location of the stimuli. Attention to location increased responses in the contralateral (right) primary somatosensory and inferior parietal cortices. This result implies that these components of the lateral pain system are concerned mainly with the localization of pain. In contrast, attention to unpleasantness increased responses in bilateral perigenual cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices, contralateral (right) amygdala, ipsilateral (left) hypothalamus, posterior insula, M1 and frontal pole. These areas comprise key components of the medial pain and neuroendocrine systems and the results suggest that they have a role in the affective response to pain. Our results indicate the importance of attentional effects on the pattern of nociceptive processing in the brain. They also provide the first clear demonstration, within a single experiment, of a major division of function within the neural pain matrix.

Human Pain Research Group, Clinical Sciences Building, Hope Hospital, Salford, M6 8HD, UK. bkulkarn@fs1.ho.man.ac.uk

Thirty-three adults with chronic pain and a disability were treated with hypnotic analgesia. Analyses showed significant pre- to posttreatment changes in average pain intensity that was maintained at 3-month follow-up. Significant changes were also found in pain unpleasantness and perceived control over pain but not in pain interference or depressive symptoms. Hypnotizability, concentration of treatment (e.g., daily vs. up to weekly), and initial response to treatment were not significantly associated with treatment outcome. However, treatment-outcome expectancy assessed after the first session showed a moderate association with treatment outcome. The findings support the use of hypnotic analgesia for the treatment of pain in persons with disabilities for some patients but not the use of pretreatment measures of hypnotizability or treatment-outcome expectancy for screening patients for treatment.

Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle 98195-6490, USA. mjensen@u.washington.edu

Case studies and controlled clinical trials indicate that hypnotic analgesia can effectively reduce pain in patients with a number of different chronic pain conditions. However, because none of the studies published to date have included a credible control condition that adequately controls for expectancy effects, at this point we cannot conclude that hypnotic-analgesia treatment has a specific effect on chronic pain beyond that that might be produced by a credible placebo intervention. This paper (a) describes the types of control conditions that have been, or might be, used in clinical trials of hypnotic analgesia for chronic pain; (b) reviews their strengths and weaknesses; and (c) concludes with specific recommendations that investigators should consider when designing clinical trials of hypnotic analgesia.

Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Box 356490, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-6490, USA. mjensen@u.washington.edu

Meaningful behavior requires successful differentiation of events surfacing from one's mind from those arising from the external world. Such judgements may be especially demanding during pain because of the strong contribution from psychological factors to this experience. It is unknown how the subjective reality of pain (SRP) is constructed in the human brain, and neuronal mechanisms of the subjective reality are poorly understood in general. To address these questions, 14 suggestion-prone healthy subjects rated reality of pain that was induced either by laser pulses to the skin or by hypnotic suggestion during functional MRI. Both pain states were associated with activation of the brain's pain circuitry. During laser stimulation, the sensory parts of this circuitry were activated more strongly, and their activation strengths correlated positively with the SRP. During suggestion-induced pain, the reality estimates were lower and correlated positively with activation strengths in the rostral and perigenual anterior cingulate cortex and in the pericingulate regions of the medial prefrontal cortex; a similar trend was evident during laser-induced pain. These findings support the view that information about sensory-discriminative characteristics of pain contributes to the SRP. Differences in such information between physically and psychologically induced pain, however, could be quantitative rather than qualitative and therefore insufficient for judging the reality of pain without knowledge about the source of this information. The medial prefrontal cortex is a likely area to contribute to such source monitoring.

Brain Research Unit of Low Temperature Laboratory and Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Helsinki University of Technology, FIN-02015 HUT, Espoo, Finland.

Fibromyalgia, which is relatively rare, may include symptoms of dizziness, vertigo and tinnitus. Subject was 38 years old woman reporting vertigo and whole body pain. Cochleovestibular function was normal. Pain was gradually intensified during her outpatient clinic and she was admitted. Treatments including intramusclular injection of botulinus toxin and intravenous injection of steroid were applied. Psychological counseling and autogenic training were effective in relieving her pain and vertigo. During her admission, several spells of vertigo occurred but no nystagmus was found. The abnormality in proprioception and neural disintegration may be related to vertigo. Treatment should start as early as possible together with psychological therapy.

Hino Municipal Hospital, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Hino.

Chronic neuropathic pain is difficult to diagnose and treat. For the patient, multiple aspects of his or her life may be altered, including physical, emotional, and spiritual health, as well as the ability to work, and family and social relationships. Successful treatment plans require more than just pharmacotherapy. Patients often need to receive a lot of information about complex regimens related to both pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic strategies. Additionally, patients with neuropathic pain need nursing support and guidance to help them master the self-management and coping skills required to minimize pain flares, while optimizing mood and functioning. A number of specific strategies are available based on the cognitive-behavioral model. These include the ability to interpret changes in pain in a helpful way, engagement in health promoting behaviors (including diet and exercise), and the development of an action plan for coping with pain exacerbations. A central element in this approach is to help patients become experts in understanding and managing their pain, then addressing the toll it has taken on their emotions, daily activities, and important relationships. Self-initiated techniques, such as relaxation, imagery, and hypnosis, can also be used to alter the subjective experience of pain. This article presents an overview of patient education approaches useful in the management of chronic pain.

William F. Connell School of Nursing, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA. arnstein@bc.edu

Clinical hypnosis is a skill of using words and gestures (frequently called suggestions) in particular ways to achieve specific outcomes. It is being increasingly recognised as a useful intervention for managing a range of symptoms, especially pain and anxiety. We surveyed all 317 South Australian Fellows and trainees registered with ANZCA to determine their use, knowledge of, and attitudes towards positive suggestion, hypnosis and hypnotherapy in their anaesthesia practice. The response rate was 218 anaesthetists (69%). The majority of respondents (63%) rated their level of knowledge on this topic as below average. Forty-eight per cent of respondents indicated that there was a role for hypnotherapy in clinical anaesthesia, particularly in areas seen as traditional targets for the modality, i.e. pain and anxiety states. Nearly half of the anaesthetists supported the use of hypnotherapy and positive suggestions within clinical anaesthesia. Those respondents who had experience of clinical hypnotherapy were more likely to support hypnosis teaching at undergraduate or postgraduate level when compared with those with no experience.

Department of Anaesthesia, Women's and Children's Hospital, Adelaide, South Australia.

Prognosis in surgical treatment of diseases of the oral and maxillofacial region under local anesthesia is quite commonly restricted by compliance by the patient. An alternative approach, medical hypnosis, has not been used in oral and maxillofacial surgery to any significant degree. As such, hypnosis treatment also depends to a great extent on the cooperation of the patient, and it would seem advisable to collect information concerning the individual motivation for accepting such a treatment option. The questionnaire consisted of 21 questions and was handed out to patients of the department. A total of 310 questionnaires were evaluated statistically, and the result shows a high level of acceptance of medical hypnosis by patients being treated surgically in the oral and maxillofacial region. The authors conclude that the effectiveness of this treatment option should be examined in clinical studies.

Department of Maxillofacial Surgery, University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein/Campus Luebeck, Germany. hermesddd@aol.com