Physicians at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Stanford have discovered they can pinpoint the cause of children’s seizures by using hypnosis. Finding out the reason why a child is seizing is essential for diagnosis and treatment and this groundbreaking discovery could help provide a more accurate and much faster diagnosis.
Many children have epileptic seizures which are caused by a physical reaction to psychological stress in their lives, which requires vastly different treatment to those with true epileptic seizures. This condition is known as conversion disorder and can be compared to other more commonly known ways that stress and emotions affect bodily functions, such as migraines, ulcers and blushing. Although the seizures are psychologically based, they are out of the child’s control.
The only way to discover the true cause of seizures is to monitor a child’s brain activity during the event itself, by connecting electrodes to the scalp. Although once the seizure is in progress it is easy and painless to monitor, often parents and their child have to spend days in hospital waiting for the event to occur so that it can be monitored. Often seizures do not occur in the hospital in sufferers of conversion disorder because of the removal of the stressor which is often found at home.
How Hypnosis Is Used To Monitor Seizures
The doctors at Lucile Packard have discovered that they can use hypnosis to trigger a seizure under controlled conditions in order to find out which part of the brain is causing it. Using a combination of deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation and imagery a seizure-like event can be induced. Lead by Dr Richard Shaw MD the children are asked to visualise being at their favourite place, where they are directed to recall their feelings or the events that take place that precede a typical seizure. During the hypnosis electrodes are placed on the scalp to monitor brain activity.
The research project was carried out with 9 children aged between 8 and 16 whose seizures included loss of consciousness, twitching, shaking, jerking and falling. In 8 out of 9 cases, Dr. Shaw was able to trigger a seizure like event. After sufficient brain monitoring the child is directed back to their favourite place and the episode ceases. It was discovered that in all 8 of the subjects that were monitored they were all experiencing non-epileptic seizure events.
The research is part of an ongoing study of this type of seizure to truly understand the causes and possible treatments. Currently Dr. Shaw works with many such patients, combining psychotherapy and teaching self-hypnosis to help children avoid the events that trigger seizure and encourage them to feel more in control.
