UHAM088

WHAT TREATMENTS ARE AYAILABLE? * 71

stress or anxiety. In these cases, where the cause is psychological, a psycholog-ical cure is most likely to be effective. A typical session involves your relaxing in a chair while you are encouraged to fali into a kind of sleep where you can still hear thetherapisttalking to you and are able to respond. Thetherapist will help you to defeat your headaches by giving you some coping strategies that work belo w the level of consciousness. A word of caution: be wary of advertisements that can claim to cure your problem in just one session of hypnotherapy. Try to get your doctor to suggest a good hypnotherapist, or you can find one through the British Psychological Society (BPS). A Chartered Psychologist who practises hypnotherapy is obliged to follow the Codę of Conduct of the BPS. There areprofessional limits on their behaviour, and only a person with sound high-level ąualifications in psychology can become a Chartered Psychologist.

Box 8.

Research in brief: the value of hypnosis.

This piece of research looked at the value of hypnosis in reducing migraine. Emmerson and Trexler (1999) investigated the usefulness of group hypnosis (where a whole group of patients are hypnotised at the same time) and hypnotic relaxation on the severity, duration and frequency of migraines, along with the need for medication. They studied 25 volunteers with migraines who were originally followed for 12 weeks before the hypnosis to check the severity of their normal migraines. After hypnosis, they tracked the subjects' symptoms. Not only did the hypnosis reduce the pain and regularity of the migraines in those taking part, but it also reduced by almost a half the amount of medication that was taken. The average person in the study had a migraine for 54 hours before the hypnosis, and this was brought down to 26 hours. In addition, instead of 3.8 migraine episodes every two weeks, the volunteers were experiencing 2.8. If we work this out per year by multiplying, we can see that hypnosis has madę quite a difference to migraineurs. Normally, they were each experiencing an average of 5335 hours annually of migraines. That is a lot of time, especially when you consider that this was reduced to around 1893 hours per year (a reduction of 3442 hours per year, or 57 whole days of pain). Of course, the patients in the study were not subjected to a 12-month follow-up, so we cannot be surę that the benefits of the hypnosis had a continuing effect. However, we at least know that the treatment has the potential to be quite effective.