COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy could be reduced by 10% if people’s needle anxiety was treated, according to Oxford research involving 15,014 adults published in Psychological Medicine.
Just before the first lockdown, Naveed and I (as NLP/Hypnosis trainers) were going to give an introductory course on helping people with needle phobias to anaesthetists in a hospital who told us that significant numbers of patients with needle phobias were causing delays to surgical lists daily. It seems needle phobias are pervasive in preventing people from accessing potentially important health treatments as above and also others like blood transfusions, chemotherapy, and even just blood tests.
We have found that there are many effective complementary therapies for phobias like the Havening Techniques and the BLAST technique showcased at the Integrative Health Convention, Hypnosis and NLP techniques, and many other techniques which can be brief yet effective. Phobias can be ‘cured’ unlike many psychological problems because most people definitely don’t want them to stay and once they have the option of living life without them, there is often no need for the unconscious mind / System-1 brain to return to this unhelpful behaviour.
Our opinion
If you’d like to know what we think from looking at all the different techniques:
We think that the phobias usually result from a single or sometimes repeated high emotion states (whether people are aware of them or not) causing imprinting in the unconscious (System-1 thinking), exacerbated by reinforcement which sometimes makes the phobias worse.
We find that the targets for treatment would be often to teach someone to be calm and approach the problem (as in systematic desensitisation), or reimprinting the original memory and changing the interpretation or meaning of the memory, or interrupting the chain of events that lead to the phobia self-perpetuating itself. We aren’t sure about the psychological approach of ‘flooding’ because we find it quite distressing for everyone involved.
It is our opinion that complementary therapies do have some techniques conventional medicine could really use to help the many patients in need in this context.
If you like these types of articles, we intend to highlight a few things we have learnt from science and our study of complementary therapies for you regularly in these articles – please let us know and we will keep going.
Also, we promise that next year, we are planning a spectacular online event with individual networking online and we will keep you all up to date! Have a lovely day
