Hypnosis Steps Out Of The Shadows - by Matthew Wingett
As calls for NICE to extend and evaluate the use of hypnosis in medical situations increase, Matthew Wingett describes how medical hypnosis is becoming increasingly recognised as an effective treatment for numerous conditions.
On 6th June 2009, in what he described as "a clarion call to the British medical profession", Professor David Spiegel urged the Royal Society of Medicine to ensure that doctors be taught to use hypnosis. Speaking at the joint conference of the Royal Society of Medicine, the British Society of Clinical and Academic Hypnosis and the British Society of Medical and Dental Hypnosis, Professor Spiegel urged doctors to use hypnosis for numerous procedures, including hypnotising their patients rather than using anaesthetics during some operations.
Professor Spiegel, who works at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in the US, also advised that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) should add hypnotherapy to its list of approved therapies for many more conditions. He reported that hypnotherapy is effective with allergies, high blood pressure and post-operative pain, as well as anaesthesia for liver biopsy. Hypnotherapy is already recognised by NICE for treatment of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
Professor Spiegel's call was for hypnosis to step out from the shadows and be recognised as a highly effective therapeutic procedure for appropriate conditions, and that it slough off its old image as a strange mystical practice.
"It is time for hypnosis to work its way into the mainstream of British medicine," he said, before affirming that there is solid science behind hypnosis and adding: "We need to get that message across to the bodies that influence this area. Hypnosis has no negative side-effects. It makes operations quicker, as the patient is able to talk to the surgeon as the operation proceeds, and it is cheaper than conventional pain relief. Since it does not interfere with the workings of the body, the patient recovers faster, too.
"It is also extremely powerful as a means of pain relief. Hypnosis has been accepted and rejected because people are nervous of it. They think it's either too powerful or not powerful enough, but, although the public are sceptical, the hardest part of the procedure is getting other doctors to accept it."
Although there is resistance in some quarters to the use of hypnosis, in other areas it is routinely used for pain control. Professor Marie-Elisabeth Faymonville, head of the Pain Clinic at Liege University Hospital in Belgium, has operated on over 6,000 patients using hypnosis combined with a light local anaesthetic. She explains: "The local anaesthetic is used only to deaden the surface of the skin while a scalpel slices through it. It has no effect inside the body.
"The patient is conscious throughout the operation and this helps the doctor and patient work together. The patient may have to move during an operation and it's simple to get them to do so if they remain conscious. We've even done a hysterectomy using the procedure."
To those who have done a Practitioner or Master Practitioner and Licensed Hypnotic Practitioner Course in NLP with NLP LIFE TRAINING, the theory behind hypnosis will be a familiar one. As Dr Richard Bandler points out on his courses with NLP LIFE TRAINING, at an unconscious level, the body's brain and nervous system doesn't distinguish an imagined situation from a real occurrence. This means that the brain reacts to images or verbal suggestions as if they are reality. When clients are placed into a hypnotic trance, they enter deep states of relaxation that enable them to utilise their power to generate imagery more effectively. The effect on their bodies can thus be extremely powerful.
The President of the Hypnosis and Psychosomatic Medicine Section at the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr Martin Wall, added that hypnosis deeply changes a subject's state of mind.
In response to these calls, NICE has said that it welcomes requests for hypnotherapy to be considered as an approved therapeutic technique on the NHS if it could be evaluated as cost-effective - and also providing that consistency in delivery can be guaranteed.
For those who have utilised hypnosis on themselves and others, it will come as no surprise that the technique has started to make its way into the mainstream. And for those who have witnessed psychological conditions altered on a regular basis, or experienced hypnotic anaesthesia themselves, there is little argument that needs to be made for it.
From the viewpoint of a regularly working hypnotic practitioner, it seems that - as is so often the story with NLP and hypnosis - it is just a question of time before the medical mainstream catches up with the amazing potential of the mind technologies used by NLP Practitioners.
Copyright 2009, Matthew Wingett, all rights reserved in all media.
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