Burn injuries in children lead to 300 children seeking emergency care every day in the United States. Burns cause physical pain, psychological distress, and can also lead to long-term physical impairment as a result of scarring.
The pain associated with burns can be caused by the injury, but sometimes there is even greater pain caused by the repeated cleansing and dressing of the wound.
The circumstances that led to the development of burns and related to wound care sometimes so overwhelming that they lead children to develop a lot of major mental illness including anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Hypnosis can be an extremely helpful aid in the treatment of burns in many ways.
My friend, Dr. Dabney Ewin, who was a burn surgeon, told me that he was able to use hypnosis to help prevent progression of burns from mild to moderate or from moderate to severe by telling his patients to imagine repeatedly that their wounds were “cool and comfortable.”
Hypnosis also can be used to help patients cope better with the pain caused by the burns or its treatment. For example, a patient might be coached to imagine that the uncomfortable burn is represented by a particular color, such as red. Then, the patient picks a color representing the affected area when it feels better, such as blue. In hypnosis the patient then imagines the wound area as changing from red to blue, with an associated increase in comfort.
Another pain reduction technique involves focusing on an area of the body that was unaffected by the burn. The patient is then coached to spread slowly the comfort in the unaffected area until it improves the comfort of the affected area.
Teaching patients to control their level of discomfort with hypnosis helps reduce their anxiety that can be associated with wound cleaning, and therefore reduces the probability that they will develop a mental illness thereafter.
For patients who do develop PTSD following a serious burn hypnosis can be used to revisit the memory of the burn, and restructure in a way that helps resolve the PTSD. An example of a restructuring involves teaching a child to imagine how the burn would have felt if he had known how to cope well with the associated pain.
Finally, during the recovery process from a serious burn, children can use hypnosis to imagine being healed, and this helps encourage them to work harder towards that goal.
Because of the many ways that hypnosis can help patients with burns, instruction in hypnosis should be part of the treatment protocol for such patients.
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