Science News brings us an article from October 2009 by Susan Gaidos titled, THE MESMERIZED MIND.

The article does a nice job of dismissing some of the common Hollywood myths about hypnosis while also talking about how labs and studies are now using hypnosis as a tool to study the brain. There is a great image comparing the brain activity of a hypnotized person vs. the same task and responses from a non-hypnotized brain.

You know the good old "stuck hand" routine? They've mapped it to neural activity and paths in the brain in real-time. From the article:

By rerouting motor signals to the precuneus, hypnosis appeared to decouple the typical relationship between brain areas that generate the signals for hand movement and the areas that carry out such movements. Subjects who were not hypnotized and were asked to fake paralysis showed no such disconnect between these regions.

A fascinating read, and well worth adding to your bibliographic references for clients researching hypnosis, or perhaps as a link on your web site under the "About Hypnosis" page.

Most professional hypnotherapists are small business people, and small business skills are just as important to a successful hypnotherapy business as trance skills and people skills.

However, while we've trained in the trance skills at school with teachers, the classes probably didn't include many hours of business skills. Business skills are simultaneously simple ("just do it") and complex (do what, when and why, and how much?)

There is a fabulous web site now available that will help any small business person figure out the big-picture plan with powerful strength of direction and specificity. It's called "Good Little Biz", at http://goodlittlebiz.com.

There you will find videos of Marsha Shenk, the site's creator and owner, explaining how to work though seven worksheets of questions to answer for yourself.

Whenever a person wants to look into the future, even if only for a year, a number of approaches come to light. What source do we activate to conduct such endeavors? Tea leaves, a crystal ball, tarot cards, throwing bones, psychic readers, remote viewing and clairvoyant numerology are all possibilities that have left humanity with proven results.

Past and present cultures rely on predicting the future. Most noted are indigenous tribes of the Hopi, Maya, Chinese, Hindu, African and Australian Aborigines.

One thing we do know for sure is that ‘we are the sum total of our entire past”. Present futurists such as David Icke, Jim Marrs, and Jesse Ventura glitter the future of conspiracy theories while in the past we have the predictions of Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus. Even the ‘70s popular past life hypnotist Dick Sutphen conducts present weekly interviews on his Sirius Radio show “Dick Sutphen’s Metaphysical World”. (Recently I concluded my fourth one-hour show with him, looking to more.)

I've always found one of the most amazing uses of hypnosis to be in the area of pain control. The idea that full surgery can be done without any anesthesia has always been, in my opinion, one of the most impressive applications of hypnosis.

I've often mentioned to clients or audiences that hypnosis was used in many surgeries in the 1800's, especially noted in the Civil War for amputations. Not only would the operation be pain-free, but the survival rate was much higher and healing much faster with patients that had hypnoanesthesia.

That's why I was so pleased to find the article, "Hypnosis as Sole Anesthesia for Major Surgeries: Historical & Contemporary Perspectives," which was published in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, Oct 2008. It is not only an excellent reference on the history of hypnoanesthesia, focusing on the two most noted surgeons that used it in the Victorian age, but the author also covers modern cases, applications and results of hypnoanesthesia from his personal experience.

Stop for a moment and think. Think about what happens when you get totally and utterly immersed in a story. What it’s like when you read a book or watch a movie that is so exciting and compelling that the story sucks you right into the reality of that story. You don’t care whether or not what’s happening is possible or real you just eagerly follow along and enjoy the ride.

You can experience physical sensations and emotions like your heart racing as something exciting happens, maybe a feeling of attraction towards one of the characters begins to grow inside of you, the anticipation of what’s to come that keeps you wanting more. All of these feelings all of these emotions are being experienced as if you were a part of that story.

Now all of these sensations are happening inside you while sitting in a room filled with strangers looking at an oversized TV screen, or in solitude with a stack of paper in your hands reading.

How is it possible to have a strong physical reaction to something that isn’t actually happening to you?

Because you were in fact experiencing hypnotic effect at that moment. Yes you were hypnotized.

Hypnosis could help children with emotional breathing problems, article in the Examiner dated Feb 14, 2010

This same study was also the subject of an article in the South Asia Mail, dated feb 13, 2010:
Hypnosis can ease symptoms of respiratory diseases among kids

An excerpt from the South Asia Mail article:

Ran D. Anbar, professor of paediatrics at SUNY Upstate Medical University, New York, recommends hypnosis as a treatment option when a child's respiratory symptoms appear to have a psychological component.

Anbar points to symptoms like difficulty in breathing, disruptive cough, hyperventilation, noise on inhaling such as a gasp or squeak, and difficulty swallowing despite normal lung function as possible indications for the use of hypnosis to supplement medical therapy.

I find that at parties, dinners, meetings and whenever I meet new people, people are interested in hypnosis and love to ask questions and talk about it.

One of the most fun areas of making conversation can be around all the strange names for phobias. Remember when Lucy asks Charlie Brown if he has panophobia?

"What's that?" Charlie Brown asks.

"Fear of everything," Lucy replies.

"THAT'S IT!!" yells Charlie Brown.

As a hypnotherapist you know that hypnotherapy can be very effective for reducing and eliminating phobias. In my experience, a little entertaining conversation about phobias has always done a great job of putting people at ease and creating a few laughs. It makes it very easy to say something like, "Oh yes, hypnosis works well on phobias, smoking, weight control, stress management... plus all the cool exploration like past life regression." That almost always resulted in them asking me for my card.

This video might be called, "Google maps for hypnotherapists". Learn about how 82% of people (according to a Google video on the Google Local Business Center, linked below) search for the business services they want, including hypnotherapy.

Not everyone knows it yet, but word is spreading quickly: the easiest, fastest and most comprehensive way to find the businesses and services you are seeking is online searching, not the yellow pages.

This video shows how amazing and sophisticated the searching has become in Google maps, as an example.

If you are planning your advertising for 2010, be sure you know about this before you commit to spending dollars on the dozens of yellow-pages books that are around now.

Video is 10:03 in length. See the video by clicking the 'Read More' link, below.

As professional hypnotherapists, we always want to know more about the studies and research involving hypnosis, as well as more about how the medical industry is progressing in its use and applications of hypnosis.

HypnosisAndSuggestion.org is an excellent resource for researching more about the medical side of hypnosis, consisting of grouping citations and studies together by topic. A few hours of browsing this site will familiarize you with many of the studies mentioned in press articles. If you ever have doctors asking you for resources about medical hypnosis, giving them this site is a great start.

Some of the actual texts of the studies and the journals linked require membership or subscription, and all of the organizations on the links pages require state-licensing in the medical or mental health field in order to join (so, doctors, nurses, social workers, etc. with current credentials).

This is a great place to read up on studies and the structure of studies, and a smart place for the professional hypnotherapist to spend some time learning.

In this article from BleacherReport.com, Randy Couture - a title-sweeping champion accredited with making Mixed Martial Arts a pop-culture explosion in the last 15 years - says hypnosis is one of his training tools. He credits his mental toughness and strength to a regimen of mental training and hypnosis. From the article:

“I’ve learned to listen to my body more. I rest more and train smarter. Beyond the physical, the mental is critical. I started mental training skills back when I was a wrestler. Visualization, positive thinking and hypnosis are all tools that I have used.

Learning that your mind controls everything, your body does what the mind tells it to. Athletes in particular have a voice in their head that can turn negative...questioning their training and questioning themselves. Learning that you can shut that off and control it is something that I’ve focused on over the years.

Read the BleacherReport article on Randy Couture
Article date: Feb 2, 2010