The NICE Guidelines
recommend that referral for psychological interventions (CBT, hypnotherapy and/or psychological therapy) should be considered for people with IBS who do not respond to pharmacological treatments after 12 months and who develop a continuing symptom profile, or those patients presenting with refractory IBS.
The report also notes “that gut directed hypnotherapy strategies provide IBS patients with benefits in a cost-effective manner.
Currently hypnotherapy is used as a second line therapy option, usually for patients with unresolved IBS symptoms, who have failed to respond to a combination of management strategies.
The NICE guidelines include hypnotherapy in one of its top five research recommendations, with the potential for this intervention to be considered as a first line therapy option.”
The guidelines note that with consideration as a first line therapy option, this treatment method has potential to enable the IBS patient to cope with their symptoms by giving initial treatments which would have long term sustainability. This view was supported by evidence in children with IBS, which showed that hypnotherapy is clinically effective as a first line therapy.
In addition, the authors of an article entitled General Practitioners Believe that Hypnotherapy could be a useful Treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome in Primary Care, published in BMC Family Practice in 2004 concluded that “the vast majority of general practitioners think that current management options for IBS are variable in their effectiveness.” Many agreed that this condition needs improved treatment options in primary care and a large majority of general practitioners in this survey agreed that hypnotherapy could help patients who suffer from both physical and psychological problems that this method could play a role in the management of IBS.1
1General Practitioners Believe that Hypnotherapy could be a useful Treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome in Primary Care, Stephen Cox1 Simon de Lusignan2 and Tom Chan3
1Gillets Surgery, Deanland Road, Balcome, West Sussex, RH17 6PH, UK 2Department of Community Health Sciences, St. George's Hospital Medical School, LONDON, SW17 0RE, UK 3Surrey and Hampshire Borders NHS Trust, Ridgewood Centre, Old Bisley Road, Camberley, Surrey, GU16 5QE, UK
BMC Family Practice 2004, 5:22 doi:10.1186/1471-2296-5-22 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2296/5/22
© 2004 Cox et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
