The Effectiveness of Cognitive – Behavioral Hypnotherapy on clinical symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a functional gastrointestinal disorder that is associated with abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, or a combination of symptoms. The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy on clinical symptoms of patients with Irritable bowel syndrome. The method of this study was quasi-experimental With a pretest-posttest design with a control group. The statistical population consisted of all patients with irritable bowel syndrome referred to gastroenterologists in Urmia city during May – June 2019. Among them, 30 patients were selected by convenience method and randomly divided into experimental and control groups (15 patients in each group).  The Bowel symptoms severity-frequency scale (Solati Dehkordi et al, 2011) was administered in pre-test and post-test. The experimental group received cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy for 8 weekly sessions for 60 minutes, but the control group did not receive any intervention. The collected data were analyzed by multivariate analysis of covariance. The results showed that the average scores of physical symptoms in the experimental group were significantly lower than the control group in the post-test (p≤0/001, F=477/58). Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy can be effective in improving patients with irritable bowel syndrome.