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Hypnosis in the News
The Mind Prepared: Hypnosis in Surgery
by David Spiegel, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine
Along with an excellent set of references, this article is a very good summary of the state and factors of using hypnosis to reduce the pain and anxiety that cancer patients (or any surgery patient, really) feels. The first study mentioned is a 2007 randomized trial of 200 patients. A quote:
This brief hypnotic preparation was sufficient to produce a statistically significant reduction in the use of propofol and lidocaine; yet despite this, patients in the intervention group reported less pain, nausea, fatigue, discomfort, and emotional upset than did patients in the control group. Doing good also meant doing well, in that the use of hypnosis also resulted in a cost savings of $772.71 per patient, due largely to shorter time in the operating room—an average of 10.6 minutes.
The article goes on to mention the studies and work of Lang and colleagues, who completed a series of earlier studies that showed similar results.
An article in the New York Times talks about hospitals now starting to act on data from years of studies on using hypnosis to help make medical treatment faster, easier, less traumatic and less expensive. Quoting the article:
A study by radiologists at Harvard Medical School, published in 2000, found that patients who received hypnosis during surgery required less medication, had fewer complications and shorter procedures than patients who did not have hypnosis. In a follow-up study in 2002, the radiologists concluded that if every patient undergoing catheterization were to receive hypnosis, the cost savings would amount to $338 per patient.
And:
...hypnosis is now available to patients at some of the most respected medical institutions in the country, including Stanford Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, Mount Sinai Medical Center and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.
While the effects are impressive, they are hardly widely known yet.
Science Daily reports, Hypnosis Provides Effective Treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Study Suggests.
The University of Gothenburg, Sweden, is one of the few but growing number of Universities to undertake hypnosis research. This study was designed with the idea of using hypnosis in ordinary healthcare. The article summaries the success in a recent year-long study as well as follow-ups on two other studies which show outstanding results for long-term effectiveness of hypnosis for IBS.
"The conclusion is that hypnotherapy could reduce both the consumption of healthcare and the cost to society, and that hypnosis therefore belongs in the arsenal of treatments for IBS," to quote Researcher Magnus Simrén.
Oregon Live ran this story about a new technology being used at the Oregon Burn Center at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland: virtual reality hypnosis for dressing changes for burn victims.
Dressing changes are extremely painful but need to done multiple times per day, sometimes for weeks. They are definitely the "sore spot" in burn care, elevating the stress and tension in patients that slows healing and has patients thinking of ways to avoid it, bringing on compliance problems.
Patients are distracted by flying and performing tasks using a computer mouse in an immersive virtual world called SnowWorld with hypnotic scenery, music and pacing.
In clinical trials, burn patients using SnowWorld reported 35 to 50 percent reductions in pain. The system was developed at the University of Washington by research scientist Hunter Hoffman and psychologist David Patterson, with input from burn care experts at Harborview Burn Center in Seattle.
Patterson's group has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a controlled clinical trial of virtual reality hypnosis for chronic pain.
Read the story of Randy McAllister, a patient that has used the technology, in the Oregon Live article.
The San Jose Mercury news ran an article about San Francisco Giant's Bruce Bochy using hypnosis to quit his longtime addiction to chewing tobacco, with some comments about the process and mystery of it all.
http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_18639348 -- (Aug 8, 2011)
Quotes from the article:
"I'm a believer," said Murphy, who joined the Giants as a bat boy when the franchise moved West in 1958.
"It's been the best $300 I ever spent," Hayes said. "It's weird to see how it works." (Hayes also quit chewing via hypnosis)
Bochy agrees. He already would have spent well more than $300 on dip by this point in the season, he said.
These were one-session successes, though long sessions (3.5 hrs), by medical hypnotherapist Dr. AlVera Paxson, who lives in Scottsdale, AZ. ( http://medical-hypnotherapy.com/ )
The story was on the AP News wire and carried in several other publications.
CBS News has added a nice 10-photo gallery of a patient undergoing thyroid surgery using hypnosis instead of a general anesthetic.
It's wonderful to see mass-media mentioning hypnosis, especially in such useful and close proximity to doctors and hospitals. It's also sobering to see the minimal commitment that is often made to hypnosis. This nice gallery of photos is quick to mention that "if the patient ever feels any pain, they are immediately given a shot," and "hypnosis is used only in low-risk operations that are also using local anesthetic". It fails to mention, for example, that hypnosis has been a life-saving alternative for even major surgeries in cases where general anesthetic could not be used.
One doctor is quoted as saying, "If we could get more research on the right patient groups that would benefit from (hypnosis), that would be wonderful."
Epoch Times has this nice, short article on the history and notables of using hypnotherapy to research past lives.
Approaches to Reincarnation Research
I liked it for its concise content and giving a number of researcher names and books that make threads to follow to learn more (Google those!)
UPDATE Jan 2011: Science News has switched to paywall access for all their articles, so only subscribers can now access the full article below.
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 using fMRI. 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.
If you haven't seen the Discovery Channel's show, "Mythbusters", you probably should just to see what the buzz is all about. The series has been on for several years now, and is just getting more popular.
The show tests myths and urban legends using science, experimentation and direct experience. The results are documented on video as well as rated by the show's chief lab coats as either "Plausible", "Busted" or "Confirmed".
A few years ago, the show had a segment on using hypnosis to improve memory and recall. Here's the clip, courtesy of YouTube.
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