Too Frightened to Seek Medical Help: Overcoming Phobic and Trauma-Based Medical Avoidance
Carolyn Daitch, PhD and Dan Handel, MD, FAAFP, FASCH
Format: MP3 Audio file download

This workshop presents innovative hypnotherapeutic techniques to mitigate avoidance of medical treatment caused by PTSD, medical anxiety, and phobias. For these clients, the medical setting itself can trigger severe psychological symptoms and lead to avoidance of medical treatment. This avoidance not only threatens wellbeing, but in some cases can even threaten clients' survival. This workshop identifies a variety of symptom constellations pertaining to medical avoidance and presents techniques to help such clients seek and tolerate medical interventions. Case presentations will illustrate common presentations of medical avoidance and provide insights into the psychodynamic substrate of medical avoidance. The case presentations will also address the treatment of PTSD in which the precipitating trauma occurred in a medical setting. Structured hypnotic interventions will be demonstrated aimed at decreasing anxiety, reframing past negative experiences, increasing the tolerance for medical consultation and treatment, and increasing one's sense of self-control. This will include specific techniques to manage apprehension, fear, and worries by altering the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physical responses to trauma-based avoidance of medical treatment. Participants will learn to increase sensitivity in diagnosing and managing medical avoidance, understanding and managing PTSD and phobic disorders, and offering suggestion-based approaches to increase medical compliance, self-control, affect regulation, and ego-strengthening.