Abstract
Natural language processing (NLP) technologies have been widely acknowledged in clinical informatics research and have led to transformational improvements in recent years. Annotations at the different morphological levels require model-specific attributes and features, such as document content regarding patient status and report type. Document types include medical histories, named entities, and concepts diagnoses, symptoms, and treatments. Semantic attributes are typically used to develop and evaluate clinical NLP systems such as negation, severity, and temporality. In hypnotherapy, hypnosis is used as a therapeutic tool to help patients make reasonable changes in their lives. Understanding hypnosis is necessary to answer the question about hypnotherapy. Several medical disorders may be treated using hypnotherapy. Pain alleviation, emotional problems, and psychological changes have been documented as examples of hypnosis’ usefulness.
Introduction
The concept of hypnotherapy might be challenging to grasp for those who have never had the process themselves. When someone is in a hypnotic trance, they know their environment but are not fully conscious of their thoughts or feelings. Hypnotherapy is the process of applying the hypnosis concept in statuses of intensified and heightened suggestibility and awareness to find therapeutic solutions to mental dilemmas. Neurolinguistic programming is the set of skills that help to reveal the state of the brain and mind that affects communication behavior. Hypnotherapy and NLP have become essential players in the healthcare sectors in the world today. They are both employed to enhance the healing process and promote patients’ conscious and subconscious levels of the healing and the world.
Medical practice has revealed the existence of a beneficial relationship between the levels of a hypnotherapist, education, and NLP technologies knowledge. The relationship is significant in helping to achieve maximum care required by patients. NLP studies and hypnotherapy are broad fields gain popularity among medical scholars. Various literature reviews by several authors have been written, and this research will base its findings and conclusion on credible sources within the field of hypnotherapy and NLP studies. Currently, a significant relationship plays an essential role between hypnotherapists, education level, and individuals who know NLP. These levels of knowledge are studied separately in the literature; the clear effect of their connected action was not yet established. Thus, the topic is studied to establish the nature of the relationship between levels for further promotion of positive patient outcomes. A thorough literature review is done to explore the topic, and an analysis of multiple data about the separate relevant topics to deliver an evidence-based answer.
Literature Review
Hypnotherapy is the application of hypnosis, the state of heightened and intensified awareness to achieve solutions to various mental dilemmas through therapy. Both patients and professional psychologists can practice this technique to prevent distressing symptoms or disorders, relieve stress, or change behavior. This method is specifically beneficial for influencing others who endure these mental afflictions.
The history of hypnotherapy has been traced back to the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Indians, Persians, and Sumerians, who studied the altered state of mind and parapsychology. The development of hypnotherapy was earlier stagnant but started developing in the middle ages, where the Islamic scientists further studied to expand this branch of psychology. This “revival” arose simultaneously with the cultural and economic growth of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the 18th century. For example, Dr. Frantz Anton Mesmer, a German doctor, created a technique to rid people of diseases in questionable demonstrations and was ridiculed for his orthodox method. Despite the criticism, he continued to conduct these performances and became successful. His colleague Armand De Puysegur worked on his research and showed that direct spoken commands attribute to hypnosis.
Further, Dr. James Braid, a Scottish optometrist, discovered that a person fixed on an object was more susceptible to the state of mesmerism. Additionally, Dr. Emily Coue, a psychologist initialized auto suggestions, a technique widely used today in self-treatment (Rahmanzadeh, 2017). Hence, she created this technique to help those with trouble doing an activity.
Modern hypnotherapy has evolved into a more applicable and flexible technique. Recently the study of hypnotherapy has been split into intrinsic and instrumental studies. Intrinsic studies are based on learning basic hypnosis and how it works. In contrast, instrumental studies are based on suggestions used in hypnosis and bring in new people outside the investigation into the picture. Significant results were achieved to understand the neuropsychological correlations of hypnotic practices for treating multiple clinical conditions. Based As such, one research was focused on treating psychological disorders (Jensen et al., 2017). This research has enhanced our understanding of the connection between hypnosis and neurological reactions, leading to the research of hypnotherapy and the flexibility of the treatments possible with this type of therapy (Crane, 2016). Hypnotherapy is a well-known alternative treatment that can elevate anxiety, stress, and pain relief. It has diminished pain during childbirth, cancer treatment, and even surgery. Moreover, it has been discovered to minimize undesired behavior such as bedwetting and smoking. However, this practice is not entirely accepted by the medical community.
Professional hypnotherapists in Australia have documented the statistical results of hypnotherapy for varying totals of consecutive patients. In one poll, 90.6% of the patients who desired to quit smoking successfully quit the act (Grace Space, 2019). Additionally, 71% of the patients were smoke-free after two years (Grace Space, 2019). In comparison with other treatments, hypnosis assists in quitting smoking 5% of smokers want to quit, the practice is victorious (Grace Space, 2019). The overall outcomes have shown that hypnotherapy is better than the rest. Another study shows the effect of hypnotherapy on chronic pain and alleviates the symptoms of depression of some workers in which 300 sewers and 50 cutters participated in the survey and experiment (Jensen et al., 2017). Moreover, 30 to 54% of the workers reported chronic pain and depression, reported a better outlook of life, and improved self-confidence (Jensen et al., 2017). This proves that hypnotherapy is quite effective. It can further be supported by the research on children’s response and relief supplied by self-hypnosis at a pulmonary pediatrics center. Of the 81 children, 75% returned for follow-up lessons, and of that amount of children, there was an improvement of 95% on resolution and psychological symptoms they initially had (Holt, 2019). These researches’ results point out that hypnotherapy might be helpful for physical and emotional support.
Ultimately, hypnotherapy is a functional technique with various degrees of success. For instance, it can enhance people’s morale under stress, elevate painful symptoms or disorders and even improve behavior. It seemingly benefits many people suffering from various mental ailments. Its future development is bound to change the world for the better. As a result of healthcare professionals’ concerns about patients’ health literacy, specific national initiatives like Open Notes have had low traction or adoption among patients. Rather than weighing in on the advantages of patient data access, healthcare providers are concerned that their patients may not grasp the jargon used in clinical notes. According to the researchers, NLP systems can recognize and associate sophisticated medical terminology with layman explanations. However, researchers like Rijk et al. (2019) criticize the practice due to insufficient evidence. Thus, NLP remains a controversial topic among scholars and medical workers.
Methods
The proper use of enormous data sources like EHR databases might primarily influence health care research and delivery. Because EHRs now includes so much free text, there has been a rise in research into clinical NLP methodologies and applications. The field has evolved in recent years, resolving many issues and implementing many suggestions. For example, de-identification, recognition, and categorization of medical concepts, semantic modifiers, and temporal information are recommended. Several everyday tasks have solved these issues. These include the CLEF eHealth challenges and the Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) challenges. These initiatives have created a worldwide NLP technique development platform.
Furthermore, open-source NLP software targeted to clinical literature has increasing use. A few examples of NLP software include cTAKES1 and CLAMP2, information extraction and retrieval infrastructure solutions like SemEHR, and general-purpose tools like GATE3 and Stanford CoreNLP. Like the Health NLP Center 5, new efforts attempt to improve resource sharing, allowing further advancement in NLP methodology availability, transparency, and repeatability. In recent years, behavioral, emotional, and cognitive markers and clues on how patients deal with various illnesses and therapies have been more available. Examples of text sources include social media, online doctor-patient interactions, and online therapy. Despite several similar objectives relating to mental health, the discipline is still smaller than biological or general clinical NLP.
A rise in NLP solutions for complicated clinical outcomes research is due to the maturity of NLP technique development and findings. NLP evaluation and appraisal procedures vary from clinical research methods, albeit both employ NLP for data preparation and extraction. These disparities must be clarified, and new techniques and methods developed to overcome the gap. However, the approach used in the research is somewhat not sufficient for giving a significant answer for the topic. Namely, the reviews of the scholars and articles used in work might be prejudiced; thus, the work results are also discriminatory. Yet, it is possible to overcome this problem by applying critical analysis to the data.
Results
Researchers may benefit from NLP techniques. To move this profession forward, more rigorous assessment procedures are needed. To overcome the issue of data access, synthetic data and new governance structures might be used. Extrinsic and thorough assessment workbenches are required. The use of structured protocols may improve reporting standards. One of the most important aspects of hypnosis is that it may be used with various therapeutic modalities, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (Crane 2016). Learn to hypnotize yourself at home to lessen chronic pain, enhance sleep, or relieve some of the symptoms of despair or anxiety. Before amputations, soldiers were hypnotized by Army doctors, who utilized the technique for decades to alleviate agony. It has helped reduce pain in recent trials.
Discussion
Hence, it can be elaborated about the study results in a more critical manner. According to the study’s findings, “patients benefit from NLP-enabled systems because they bundle associated individual’s health information with EHR notes, making it easier for patients to understand their EHRs” (Grand Space, 2019, para. 8). NoteAid, an NLP tool developed by this research team to improve patient portal utilization was the subject of previous investigations. Using the CoDeMed and MedLink algorithms, NoteAid was shown to be most successful at identifying and connecting patients to medical jargon meanings. The doctors’ evaluations were mixed, with both favorable and negative comments.
Researchers have made a few changes after the study ended, they said. New lay definitions have been introduced to CoDeMed by researchers, enhancing the tool’s usability and patient access to definitions on their portal. The researchers will need to test this technology with patients in the future to confirm that it is usable by the general public. The researchers determined that the next step would be to conduct a study in which patients would test the system. In conjunction with patient portals like the VA’s MyHealtheVet, tools like NoteAid may increase patient EHR understanding, leading to better patient experiences, engagement, and health knowledge. The healthcare business needs to account for patient education and health literacy gaps. Patients with a high degree of patient comprehension are more likely than those who do not become actively engaged in their treatment.
Thus, it can be said that the study has limitations in data unavailability at the moment. The critics and pro-articles about the discussed topics do not reach a certain conclusion, making it difficult to provide a certain answer. It was not expected that the researches and articles would show such a positive mark for the practices of NLP and hypnosis. Moreover, there are still questions about the relationship between the risks and benefits of the mentioned practices.
Conclusion
NLP is a feasible option for patient portal utilization, a procedure often impeded by a lack of health literacy on the part of the patient population. Recently published studies in medicine, NLP should be used with caution because of the potential for poor term linkage and algorithmic mistakes. In the interest of patient portals, NLP is a new and promising method. Medical data and clinician notes may be accessed via patient portals, which attempt to improve patient engagement by providing an adequate update about their health. However, these technologies become disadvantageous when patients are subjected to a barrage of medical jargon they cannot comprehend.
References
Crane, E., & A. (2016). Married Ohio lawyer Michael Fine jailed for hypnotizing women for sexual pleasure. Mail Online.
Grace Space. (2019). Does hypnosis work? Understanding the science of hypnotherapy. Grace Space Hypnosis.
Holt, R. (n.d.). Brief history of hypnosis. Clevedon Hypnotherapy. Web.
Jensen, M. P., Jamieson, G. A., Lutz, A., Mazzoni, G., McGeown, W. J., Santarcangelo, E. L., Demertzi, A., de Pascalis, V., Bányai, V. I., Rominger, C., Vuilleumier, P., Faymonville, M. E., & Terhune, D. B. (2017). New directions in hypnosis research: Strategies for advancing the cognitive and clinical neuroscience of hypnosis. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2017(1).
Rahmanzadeh, S. (2017). Victim speaks out about lawyer convicted of hypnotizing his clients. ABC News.
Rijk, L., Derks, L., Grimley, B., & Hollander, J. (2019). The Evidence for NLP. International Coaching Psychology Review, 14(1).