Hypnosis as sole anaesthesia for skin tumour removal in a patient with multiple chemical sensitivity

Abstract

Summary A female patient with multiple chemical sensitivity and previous anaphylactoid reactions to local anaesthetics was admitted for removal of a thigh skin tumour under hypnosis as sole anaesthesia. The hypnotic protocol included hypnotic focused analgesia and a pre‐operative pain threshold test. After inducing hypnosis, a wide excision was performed, preserving the deep fascia, and the tumour was removed; the patient's heart rate and blood pressure did not increase during the procedure. When the patient was de‐hypnotised, she reported no pain and was discharged immediately. Our case confirms the efficacy of hypnosis and demonstrates that it may be valuable as a sole anaesthetic method in selected cases. Hypnosis can prevent pain perception and surgical stress as a whole, comparing well with anaesthetic drugs.

The Odyssey of Dental Anxiety: From Prehistory to the Present. A Narrative Review

“…Several behavioral techniques allow for a proper patient's management, including the above mentioned use of psychological tests for the assessment of DA (Facco et al, 2008, 2015b), iatrosedation (Friedman, 1967, 1983, 1993; Friedman and Wood, 1998; Taneja, 2015), empathic communication (Wiltshire et al, 2002; Parkin et al, 2014), and hypnosis (Facco et al, 2013a,b, 2014; Facco and Gonella, 2015), but they are still underused, looking traditionally incompatible with the ruling reductionist approach. Of course, pharmacological sedation may be added as well, when needed.…”

“…Hypnosis has a stronger potential, in that it can be effectively used to decrease or recover from DA in the preoperative phase as well as induce a deep relaxation and increase of pain threshold during dental care; in patients with high hypnotic ability, hypnotic analgesia may also allow to reach the level of surgical analgesia (Casiglia et al, 2007; Facco et al, 2011a, 2013a). …”

Epistemological implications of near-death experiences and other non-ordinary mental expressions: Moving beyond the concept of altered state of consciousness

“…There is now increasing evidence that it may improve control over unconscious functions, paralleled by activation and/or deactivation of several brain areas: for example, hypnotic analgesia is the result of a topdown regulation of the pain neuromatrix, a widely distributed neural network, including somatosensory, limbic and thalamocortical components and subserving the sensorydiscriminative, affective-motivational and evaluative-cognitive dimensions of pain experience (82;83); it is not mediated by endogenous opioids and may be so powerful as to allow for surgery (84)(85)(86)(87)(88)(89).…”

Hypnoanalgesia and the study of pain experience: from Cajal to modern neuroscience

“…Hypnoanalgesia has proved to be very effective in the treatment of pain, which includes chronic oncological pain (Cassileth and Keefe, 2010; Sohl et al, 2010), HIV neuropathic pain (Dorfman et al, 2013), pain during extraction of molars (Abdeshahi et al, 2013), pain associated to physical trauma (Patterson et al, 2010), pain in surgical procedures (Facco et al, 2013), pain associated to temporomandibular joint disorder (Abrahamsen et al, 2010), phantom limb (Mack et al, 2013), fibromyalgia (Derbyshire et al, 2009), pain in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Palmieri et al, 2012), acute pain in children (Yaster, 2010), lumbago (Tan et al, 2010, 2014), and pain in childbirth (Oster, 1994; VandeVusse et al, 2007; Abbasi et al, 2009), amongst others. This fact fits what Cajal suggested more than a century ago.…”