Efficacy of hypnosis in adults undergoing surgery or medical procedures: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Hypnosis and top-down regulation of consciousness

“…For example, a meta-analysis of 18 studies found that the average client receiving cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy displayed greater improvement than at least 70% of clients receiving the same non-hypnotic cognitive-behavioral treatment (Kirsch, Montgomery, & Sapirstein, 1995 (Flammer & Bongartz, 2003). There is also evidence for superior outcomes for hypnosis than control treatment in outcomes related to surgical patients (20 studies) (Montgomery, David, Winkel, Silverstein, & Bovbjerg, 2002) and surgical or medical patients (34 RCTs) (Tefikow et al, 2013), reduced nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing chemotherapy (6 RCTs) (Richardson et al, 2007), and reduced needle-related pain and distress in children and adolescents (7 trials) (Birnie et al, 2014). By contrast, further research is needed to more adequately evaluate the use of hypnosis in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (Lynn & Cardeña, 2007), anxiety (Schoenberger, Kirsch, Gearan, Montgomery, & Pastyrnak, 1997), smoking cessation (Green & Lynn, 2000), and obesity (Sapp, 2017).…”

Neurophysiology of hypnosis

“…A recent meta-analysis comprising a total of 2597 patients undergoing surgical or medical procedures revealed effects of hypnosis on various pre-and postoperative factors such as emotional distress, pain, medication consumption, physiological parameters, recovery, and surgical procedure time as compared to standard care alone or an attention control [57]. By applying the hypnotic procedure we routinely used in surgery, we showed that affective (unpleasantness) as well as sensory (perceived intensity) components of pain perception were both reduced as compared to control conditions [17,16,18].…”

Evidence-Based Psychotherapy

“…For example, Smith and Glass (1977) found a mean effect size of d ¼ 0.85 across 475 studies, indicating that the average psychotherapy client is superior to 80% of the controls receiving no or only placebo treatment. More recent psychotherapy meta-analyses have addressed specific questions, such as specific treatments, specific disorders, specific therapist factors, or even combinations of these factors (e.g., Butler et al, 2006;Cabral and Smith, 2011;Cuijpers et al, 2011;Tefikow et al, 2013). Meta-analysis has also been used to integrate comparative treatment research in which different therapeutic approaches are compared directly (e.g., Shapiro and Shapiro, 1982;Tolin, 2010).…”