What if your mind’s eye could take you to a place so peaceful that the experience eased your pain or sped your recovery from surgery? It’s not such a far-fetched concept. In fact there are many studies that show that guided imagery can be good in many parts of your life.
“Guided imagery,” a type of mind-body therapy that uses visualized images to communicate to the housekeeping systems of the body, is making its way into traditional medical settings.
“People are just now taking a very serious look at it,” said David E. Bresler, co-founder of the Academy for Guided Imagery, in Malibu, Calif., and author of the book Free Yourself From Pain. “There are a handful of hospitals around the country and around the world that are starting to implement these programs,” he said.
Studies in Guided Imagery
In one study, researchers at Harvard Medical School found that more than 30 percent of U.S. adults have used some form of mind-body medicine, a category that includes imagery, according to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Bresler, a traditionally trained Ph.D. neuroscientist, first became intrigued with alternative methods of pain relief in the early 1970s, as founder and director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Pain Control Unit.
Patients often used vivid images to describe their pain. It felt like an ice pick to one person, fire ants to another. One particular patient, a psychiatrist with a painful rectal carcinoma, suffered low back pain that he said “felt like a dog chewing on my spine.”
Bresler knew that when patients used their imagination to go to a peaceful place, it helped them to relax, so he guided the agitated psychiatrist through a relaxation exercise. When the man’s pain flared up, Bresler instructed him to speak to the dog. Would it let go of his spine? Then, an astonishing thing happened — when the dog let go to talk, the man’s pain subsided.