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Gut reactions
The festive season can be anything but happy for people with IBS. Barbara Rowlands investigates hypnosis as an intriguing new approach to a condition no one fully understands. Edited by Chris McLaughlin. Illustration by James Fryer
Cass Williamson, 54, was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) four years ago but says she has been suffering from it since she was a child. “Throughout my life the area under my stomach has always caused me trouble and no one could put a name to it.
“I had diarrhoea and bouts of constipation, pain under the solar plexus and two stomach ulcers. I was knocking back indigestion medicine but nothing changed. I would always feel sick, nauseous and have reflux.”
Her GP referred her to the gastroenterology department at Wythenshawe Hospital, Manchester, where she underwent gut–directed hypnotherapy.
After the first session she felt calmer and by the 12th and final one, her IBS was under control. Cass, from Didsbury, Cheshire, was fortunate in that she lived near one of the only two NHS centres that practise gut hypnotherapy — the other one is University College Hospital (UCH), in London.
A third of us have IBS at some stage and it cripples the lives of around eight million people; yet it still leaves doctors scratching their heads. It is a bewildering mix of alternating diarrhoea, flatulence, bloating, constipation and wind and is twice as common in women as in men. When the usual tests are carried out the gut is found to be perfectly healthy, so IBS is often called a “functional” disorder.
As scientists begin to unravel the complexities of how the gut works, the psychological therapies — particularly hypnotherapy — seem to be the most successful. A survey by Bu’Hussain Haye, a clinical research Fellow at UCH, and Dr Ian Forgacs, a consultant gastroenterologist at King’s College Hospital, London, published last May in the British Medical Journal, concluded that approaches such as hypnotherapy, antidepressants and cognitive behavioural therapy could be most helpful.
Dr Anton Emmanuel, a consultant gastroenterologist, runs the UCH hypnotherapy clinic. It has been in existence for four years and has treated more than 300 patients. It is so popular that it has a six–month waiting list.
Hypnotherapy can get two–thirds of people with IBS off drugs and functioning normally, says Dr Emmanuel. The technique is also used on people with colitis (where the lining of the colon is inflamed), and has been successful in half of patients, and in people with swallowing problems, where the success rate is 80 per cent. “There is lots of clinical data showing that patients respond well to hypnotherapy. There is a real need out there.” Much of that clinical data has been produced by Peter Whorwell, Professor of Gastroenterology at Wythenshawe Hospital, where Cass was treated. He pioneered gut–directed hypnotherapy and has been practising it since 1984…
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