Specialised gut-directed hypnotherapy has emerged as an effective treatment for the relief of gastrointestinal symptoms, researchers have found.
They say the durable effects of gut-directed hypnotherapy are similar to those found with the low FODMAP diet for symptomatic relief – while hypnotherapy was found to have has “superior efficacy” to the diet on psychological indices. No additive effects were found.
Co-author of the study, published in Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Professor Peter Gibson, said the findings were very exciting.
“We’ve been using hypnotherapy and we’ve very impressed by its benefits,” he told the limbic. “It was interesting to see there might be a potential gain over low FODMAP.”
Professor Gibson and his team of researchers at Monash University, who developed the at-times controversial low FODMAP diet, which was recently given a huge tick of approval from a large US-led study.
This recent study set out to compare the effects of gut-directed hypnotherapy to the low FODMAP diet on gastrointestinal symptoms and psychological indices, and assess additive effects.
He said that while there had been significant benefits from gut-directed hypnotherapy, it produced no additional benefits when used in conjunction with a low FODMAP diet.
“The best management for IBS is multi-faceted and there are a lot of different therapies that work well together, but there was no benefit at all from using the gut-directed hypnotherapy and low FODMAP together.”
Professor Gibson said there was strong interest from clinicians in the US and the UK in using this type of hypnotherapy, although it was still not widespread there or in Australia.
“It needs to be gut-targeted hypnotherapy, not just any hypnotherapy,” he warned. “They’ve (hypnotherapists and psychologists) got to understand what irritable bowel is and that’s one of the challenging things about this,”
Currently there are only a few hypnotherapists in Australia who specialise in gut-targeted therapy, and there are no accredited training programs here to upskill professionals.
“That’s another challenge,” he said. “We hope the psychologists take it up and we can work with more patients.”