Hypnotherapy as an adjunct to narcotic analgesia for the treatment of pain for burn debridement.

This paper presents a hypnotherapeutic intervention for controlling pain in severely burned patients while they go through dressing changes and wound debridement. The technique is based on Barber's (1977) Rapid Induction Analgesia (RIA) and involves hypnotizing patients in their rooms and having their nurses provide posthypnotic cues for analgesia during wound cleaning. Five subjects who underwent hypnotherapy showed reductions on their pain rating scores (Visual Analogue Scale) relative to their own baselines and to the pain curves of a historical control group (N = 8) matched for initial pain rating scores. Although the lack of randomized assignment to experimental and control groups limited the validity of the results, the findings provide encouraging preliminary evidence that RIA offers an efficient and effective method for controlling severe pain from burns.