Medical Hypnosis: You Are Getting Very Healthy

Medical Hypnosis: You Are Getting Very Healthy, is a must read for consumers and for all health care professionals. Dr. Safer, a New York psychologist who has a rare but curable form of leukemia, started out as a skeptic, but found that hypnosis helped put her at ease before biopsies, MRIs and several surgeries. She now uses it with some of her patients as well. “It’s an excellent self-management technique,” she says. “It gives me a feeling of mastery, a sense that I am participating in my own care rather than just being passive.” On the mornings she undergoes chemotherapy, Jeanne Safer hypnotizes herself en route in the taxi. She starts by closing her eyes, then rolling them up to the top of her head and down, all the while breathing deeply. “As I’m doing that, I’m saying to myself, ‘This is a procedure that will save my life. I’m not going to fight it. I’m going to make it as easy on my body as possible,’ ” she says. Whether or not you can be hypnotized is your choice. If you choose you can easily learn hypnosis and use self hypnosis for all aspects of your life.

Medical Hypnosis:
You Are Getting Very Healthy

Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2012: Hypnosis has been the subject of fascination, intrigue and ridicule for centuries. Now, researchers are getting closer to understanding why and how it can work. The mechanism may be similar to the placebo effect—in which patients’ expectations play a major role in how they feel. Hypnosis, in turn, can help patients adjust those expectations to minimize pain, fear and disability.

“We can teach people how to manage pain and anxiety, ” says David Spiegel, a psychiatrist and director of the Center for Health and Stress at Stanford University who has studied hypnosis for 40 years. “There’s been this mistake in medicine that if you have a certain amount of tissue damage, you should feel this amount of pain. But many things can alter how much pain you feel.”

Indeed, scientific evidence is mounting that hypnosis can be effective in a variety of medical situations, from easing migraine headaches to lowering blood pressure, controlling asthma attacks, minimizing hot flashes and diminishing side effects from chemotherapy.

Last week, two studies from Sweden found that one hour a week of hypnotherapy for 12 weeks eased symptoms of irritable-bowel syndrome in 40% of patients (compared with 12% in a control group) and that the positive effects can last as long as seven years.

Such scientific findings still catch skeptics by surprise—in part because many claims haven’t been carefully studied. “Hypnosis is like a good kid with a bad reputation. Everybody is interested, but in the back of their minds, they’re thinking of Bela Lugosi,” says Guy Montgomery, director of the Integrative Behavioral Medicine program at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York who has led many of the studies. “It’s not mind control. We can’t make somebody rob a bank,” he says.

However it works, a hypnotic suggestion in the mind can have measurable effects in the body. One Stanford study asked subjects to imagine that they were eating, and their secretions of gastric acid increased by 70%. In a study from Harvard Medical School published in the Lancet in 2000, patients who had 15 minutes of hypnosis before surgery not only needed less pain medication afterward, but also took less time in surgery, saving an average of $331 each.

Read Medical Hypnosis: You Are Getting Very Healthy

Certainly, if you are dealing with health care, hypnosis is for you. You can learn self hypnosis to control chronic pain, to lower your blood pressure, to lose weight, to reduce stress and anxiety, to facilitate healing and a whole host of other health and wellness uses. If you are undergoing cancer treatment with chemo or radiation, hypnosis can help your body work with the treatment for your wellness. Hypnosis is easy to learn, easy to use and can powerfully change your life.

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