Presentation title: Hypnosis treatment for gastrointestinal disorders: My three decades of work in that area and current status of the field.
About the presenter
Dr. Ólafur S. Pálsson is a clinical psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He recently returned to Iceland after 36 years in the United States, where he conducted research and clinical work at medical schools in North Carolina and Virginia. Much of Dr. Pálsson’s work has focused on biopsychosocial and epidemiological aspects of functional gastrointestinal disorders, psychological factors that modulate physical symptoms, and ways to treat of chronic GI problems effectively with hypnosis. He is internationally recognized for the development of the fully scripted and empirically validated North Carolina hypnosis protocol for irritable bowel syndrome, which is used by hundreds of hypnosis-trained health professional in the U.S. and world-wide. This protocol has served as a model for the development of standardized hypnosis treatment approaches for several other health problems. Dr. Pálsson has authored more than 250 published papers in psychology and medicine, as well as numerous book chapters in edited books, and has taught health professionals the use of hypnosis for chronic physical health problems regularly for more than two decades.
Presentation Abstract
In this presentation, Dr. Pálsson will summarize his three decades of pioneering work in research and clinical applications of hypnosis treatment for gastrointestinal disorders, describe his and his colleagues’ efforts to gain recognition for hypnotherapy as a mainstream treatment for gastrointestinal disorders, and discuss the current status of that sub-domain of clinical hypnosis. He will outline the unique approach to treat chronic psychophysiological disorders reliably with hypnosis that evolved from his doctoral dissertation research in the early 1990s, and how this became the basis of validated standardized hypnosis treatments for several gastrointestinal disorders. In 1995, Dr. Pálsson created the first fully scripted hypnotherapy course for a chronic health problem – the socalled North Carolina Protocol – which has been found efficacious in nine published clinical trials. This protocol has been shared with qualified hypnotherapists for two decades, and is currently in use by hundreds of therapists in several countries. An app-based version of this protocol is the only hypnosis treatment to date to be formally recognized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as effective and safe medical treatment – a landmark step toward wider acceptance of medical hypnosis in mainstream medicine in the U.S. Finally, Dr. Pálsson will explain how hypnosis has successfully embedded itself as a standard therapeutic modality in nearly all the top gastroenterology clinics throughout the U.S. in the last ten years, in a way not seen for any other medical specialty in that country, and discuss the causal elements that have made this possible.