Hypnosis consultations for Health and Quality of Life
Hypnosis does not act on a lesion, an inflammation or a virus. It acts on how your nervous system processes what is happening: the pain you feel, the tension, the anticipation, your sleep, the exhaustion of having to hold on.
This is what is called supportive care: something that goes alongside treatment, never something that replaces it.
This page guides you according to what you are going through, and sets out from the start the three rules that apply to all of our health-related work.
Three rules, before anything else
- The medical work-up comes first, without exception. No symptom should be attributed to stress before a doctor has done what is needed. Pain, a digestive issue, a fatigue that settles in can have causes that need identifying, and some are serious. A serious practitioner will ask where you stand with your check-up, and refer you if necessary.
- We never replace or delay any care. Giving up on a treatment or putting off starting it has real consequences. If you are unsure about a treatment or tolerate its effects poorly, that conversation belongs with your doctor.
- You are not responsible for your illness. You will come across claims that an illness stems from a psychic conflict, repressed emotions or a lack of positive thinking. That is false, and it is cruel: it adds guilt to suffering. Stress did not make you ill. What it does do is make illness harder to live with. And that, yes, can be worked on.
Identify your situation
| What you are going through | Your page |
|---|---|
| Pain that lingers, migraines, pain linked to treatment or a procedure. | Living better with pain |
| Bloating, abdominal pain, disrupted transit, irritable bowel. | Digestive system, the "second brain" |
| Living with a chronic or serious illness: diagnosis, treatments, fear of recurrence, fatigue, a changing body. | Living better with illness |
What they share: perception, not the lesion
These three areas share the same mechanism, and understanding it clears up a lot of misunderstandings.
Your brain does not passively receive the body's signals: it interprets them, adjusts them, and decides how loudly to send them up to your awareness.
The same piece of information (abdominal tension, a nerve signal…) can be perceived as mild discomfort or as overwhelming suffering, depending on the state of the nervous system processing it.
That is why anticipation almost always makes things worse: dreading the pain before the test, watching for the symptom, bracing for the flare-up. The body tenses, the perception threshold drops, and the loop closes on itself.
This is exactly where hypnosis works: on that setting, on the anticipation, and on the stress-symptom loop. It does not make an inflammation disappear, it does not close a lesion, but it often changes, sometimes a great deal, the place the symptom takes up in a life.
What Hypnosis Offers When You Are Ill
What hypnosis brings, whatever your situation
- An effect on the symptom itself: pain in particular, the area where hypnosis has its strongest body of evidence.
- Less anticipation, which is often half the problem: fear of the test, the procedure, the next flare-up.
- Better sleep, without which nothing else holds: fatigue lowers your tolerance for everything else — see Sleep and insomnia.
- Autonomy, through self-hypnosis. This is central here: in a course of care where you endure so much, having a tool that belongs to you — usable in the waiting room, during a test, on a hard night — often matters as much as the effect itself.
- A space for what does not get said elsewhere: the weariness, the fear, sometimes the anger, that people hold back so as not to worry loved ones or be seen as "the difficult patient".
Hypnosis is already in hospitals, including yours
Something that often reassures people: hypnosis is not a fringe practice in healthcare. It is used in many settings: in anaesthesia and for certain painful procedures, in gastroenterology, in oncology, in dental care, in paediatrics… and growing numbers of healthcare staff are trained in it.
If your facility offers hypnosis, supportive care or psychological support, use those first: they are built into your care pathway, delivered by professionals on your own team, and covered.
Info-Santé 811 can also point you in the right direction, and the Guichet d'accès à la première ligne gets you an appointment if you have no family doctor. Our practice comes alongside all of that, on subjects those teams do not always have time to cover.
When to see a doctor without waiting
A few markers that apply across this whole section:
- any symptom that is new or getting worse
- pain that is unusual or changes in character
- blood in your stool or urine
- unexplained weight loss
- a persistent fever
- fatigue that sets in for no clear reason
- any symptom that wakes you at night
These signals do not necessarily point to something serious, but they call for an examination, not a session. Each of our pages details, for its own situation, the signs that call for prompt medical attention.
Our framework, stated plainly
In Quebec, psychotherapy is a regulated act. We are neither doctors, psychologists, nor psychotherapists: our services are rooted in helping relationships and well-being, and we make no diagnosis. We do not comment on your treatments and we stand in for no member of your care team.
Go deeper on one specific topic
Some situations come up often and have their own article, published on solutionshypnose.com:
- Tinnitus: what hypnosis can, and cannot, do about a noise that never stops.
- Menopause: hot flashes, sleep, mood, a changing relationship with your body.
- Bruxism: grinding and clenching, the tension that carries on through the night.
- Chemotherapy side effects: nausea, fatigue, dread of the next session.
Find a Hypnotherapist near you
In Office or Online Across Canada
Offices in Montreal, Gatineau, Sherbrooke, Montérégie…
And if you live far away or elsewhere in the world, online sessions work very well. Evening slots available.
All areas
Annie Mayrand
Gatineau - Cumberland (ON)
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Christian Rocher
Beloeil
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David Veilleux
Montréal - Anjou
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Florence Aton
Sutton
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Jessica Reid
Sherbrooke
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Julie Rocque
Montréal - Jean-Talon
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Nuria Pérez de León
Montréal - Rosemont - Saint-Lambert
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Romain Rastoin
Bromont
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Réjeanne LeBlanc
La Prairie
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Frequently asked questions about hypnosis and illness
No, and no one should let you hope for that. It acts neither on a lesion, nor an inflammation, nor the course of an illness. What it changes is how your nervous system processes the body's signals: the pain you feel, anticipation, tension, sleep. It is supportive care: useful, documented in certain areas, and never a substitute for treatment.
Yes, that is the rule common to this whole section. A symptom is never attributed to stress before a doctor has done what is needed, and a functional disorder is only diagnosed once everything else has been ruled out, never in its place. We will always ask where you stand with your work-up.
No, and this question deserves a clear answer: your symptoms are real. The brain constantly adjusts the body's signals, and that setting can go off: normal sensations then get perceived as painful. This is documented, it has a name, and it is precisely what hypnosis works on. "Functional" never means "imaginary".
Rarely the cause, often a factor that keeps it going. Stress genuinely changes muscle tension, digestive motility and pain perception, and that is not just a figure of speech. But it does not create cancer or autoimmune disease, and you have nothing to reproach yourself for. Rather than looking for someone to blame, the work in therapeutic hypnosis breaks the loop from both ends.
Yes, this is even the normal setting for this kind of work, which is designed as a complement. Two rules: tell your practitioner about your care, and never stop, delay or change a treatment without the person who prescribed it. It is also useful to tell your doctor about this work.
It depends on the area: six to eight for digestive work, more and over a longer period for chronic pain or a progressive illness, three to five for a targeted goal like preparing for a procedure. Each page sets out its own format. Self-hypnosis is taught from the start in every case.
It depends on your group plan. Receipts are issued (counselling, naturotherapy or hypnotherapy depending on the practitioner's affiliation: RITMA, ANN), but not every insurer accepts them: check your policy. Think about your employee assistance programme too, and remember that your facility's own supportive care is covered.
The guides in this topic
- Living better with pain — chronic pain, migraines, treatment-related pain.
- Digestive system, the "second brain" — functional disorders and bowel disease.
- Living better with illness — the lived experience of chronic or serious illness.
Related topics
- Sleep
- Stress management
- Anxiety · Family & life transitions — for caregiving relatives.
- To go further: the full guide on solutionshypnose.com.
We are neither doctors, psychologists, nor psychotherapists. Our services are rooted in helping relationships and well-being: they constitute neither a diagnosis, nor treatment, nor psychotherapy (a regulated act in Quebec). They neither treat nor cure any illness, and they replace no medical opinion, examination or treatment. Any symptom should be assessed by a doctor: Info-Santé 811. Never stop, delay or change a treatment without the person who prescribed it.
Page written by David Veilleux
hypnotherapist and NLP coach
partner at Solutions Hypnose.
Published .