University Uses Hypnosis To Pinpoint Children’s Seizures

Physicians at Lucile Packard’s Hospital at Stanford University have been using hypnosis to great effect. Before diagnosing the cause of children’s seizures and prescribing some serious drugs, they’ve been able to use hypnosis to ensure the diagnosis is correct and avoid potentially months or even years of wasted time.

In order to correctly diagnose a seizure, it’s important to establish which parts of the brain are causing the seizure. In the past, this has often meant hooking the child up to various monitors and then asking them and their families to wait for days at a time in the hospital in the hope that the child will have a seizure. This is not only traumatic for the child but puts a lot of pressure on the family unit and takes up valuable hospital time. In addition, whilst in hospital, many children are away from the stress or other factors that bring on a seizure so for some, they are unable to have a seizure in this environment.

Children are notoriously easy to hypnotise because they’re still very imaginative and impressionable. Under hypnosis, doctors are able to induce a seizure simply by suggesting to the child that they are going through one of their episodes.

Descriptions of the seizures are not always sufficient for an accurate diagnosis. The brain activity seen during these sessions allows the doctors to tell whether the seizures are epileptic, hence requiring drugs, or non-epileptic, requiring psychological or neurological treatment.

Hypnotherapist Richard Shaw tested a trial of nine children and in eight of the nine cases was able to successfully induce a seizure, confirming that all of these eight were experiencing non-epileptic seizures, which was as initially suspected.

For these children who are experiencing non-epileptic seizures, Shaw is using psychotherapy and hypnotherapy to teach the children not only to recognise their stress factors but then to use self-hypnosis to be able to ‘turn off’ their reactions to prevent a seizure.

Shaw has found that parents and many people initially associate hypnosis with ‘black magic’ as do many Americans as we found in our earlier article, but once the reasons and benefits are explained, most are very accepting.

Read the complete article from Medical News Today