From Prevention Magazine, 02/06.

“The Healing Power of Hypnosis.”

The latest research shows that Hypnosis eases pain,

speeds healing, increases fertility, even fights cancer.
                                 
by Alexis Jetter.

Wendy W. couldn't believe it: Her cycles had always been very regular, but the minute she decided to try to get pregnant, she stopped menstruating. After 4 months without a period, the 24-year-old nurse at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH, consulted an OB/GYN who was a fertility specialist. He couldn't find the slightest thing wrong with her or her husband. Okay, she concluded, I guess my mind has stopped my period. She called the hospital's psychiatry department. "I want someone good," she said. Da-shih Hu, MD, a psychiatrist and an assistant professor at Dartmouth Medical School, invited Wendy into his office. They talked about her life, marriage, and work but found no obvious reasons why her reproductive system had shut down. When Hu suggested that hypnosis might help, Wendy bristled. "I thought he was literally nuts," she says. "I knew nothing about hypnosis, except that it's a bad Vegas act. And I hate magicians." But two sessions later, with nothing to lose, she decided to give it a try. Hu asked her to close her eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine a wave of relaxation spreading slowly from her toes to the top of her head. "It was the feeling you get right before you go to sleep," she recalls. At the doctor's instruction, she took several more deep breaths, until she felt herself drifting off. Soon, her head slumped toward her chest, and the straight-back chair seemed to morph into a comfortable recliner. Hu asked Wendy to imagine a safe, restful place to visit, and at her suggestion, they "walked" to a waterfall. "Do you hear the sounds of water?" Hu asked. "Do you feel a breeze?" A quiet fluidity entered her soul, instilling a sense of peace she'd never known.
                                                 
"I was in the room, but I wasn't there," she says. "I was above myself, looking down, like a mom looking down at a child. And I had this amazingly powerful feeling: I felt like I could fix myself." Hu later asked Wendy to think of a day when she should start menstruating. On that very day, her period started. Soon afterward, she became pregnant, and 9 months later, her son was born.
                                      
A funny thing is happening to hypnosis, long a feature of vaudevillian routines: It's becoming respectable, working its way into the nation's premier research hospitals, medical journals, and doctors' offices. An increasing number of physicians are using hypnosis to ease patients through childbirth, angioplasty, chemotherapy, breast biopsy--even full-on surgery. Hypnosis is helping people get over fractures, burns, migraines, asthma, fibroids, peptic ulcers, and skin disorders. The same techniques practiced by ancient Egyptians 2,000 years ago and "discovered" by Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer in the late 1700s are now scoring impressive results in medical experiments across the United States, Europe, and beyond. Mind, it seems, really can overcome matter. "If somebody told you there was a medication that could treat 100 different conditions, didn't require a prescription, was free, and had no bad side effects, you wouldn't believe them," says Harvard Medical School psychologist Carol Ginandes, PhD. "I don't want to sound like a snake oil salesman, because hypnosis is not a magic wand. But it should be made available as a supplementary treatment for all patients who could benefit. Right now."
                                  
Helping the Body Heal Itself..

                                                     
Hypnosis appears to speed recovery from many types of trauma. In a 2003 pilot study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, Harvard's Ginandes and colleague Patricia Brooks, PhD, evaluated 18 women who'd just undergone reconstructive breast surgery. The patients were assigned randomly to one of three groups for 8 weeks. All groups received conventional follow-up care; the second also met weekly with a therapist for emotional support, while the third met individually with Brooks, who used hypnotic suggestion in a 30-minute session each week to reduce pain and inflammation and speed soft-tissue repair. An audiotape was made for each woman in the hypnosis group so she could practice self-hypnosis daily at home. One week after surgery and again after 7 more weeks, a surgical team, which was "blinded" to the therapy assignments, assessed the incision sites. Their conclusion: The hypnosis patients healed much faster. The women also reported that they experienced less pain and quicker recovery. An earlier Ginandes pilot study on hypnosis and bone fractures, funded by the National Institutes of Health, found similar results: faster healing, greater mobility, less discomfort, and reduced use of pain medication among orthopedic patients who used hypnosis.
                                      
Physicians have long been frustrated in their attempts to treat patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), whose symptoms - sharp abdominal pain, diarrhea or constipation, bloating, gas, and backache--are compounded by stress, anxiety, and depression. In 2003, doctors in Manchester, England, released a study that had tracked 204 IBS patients for 5 years. Patients at South Manchester University Hospital attended up to 12 hypnosis sessions over 3 months and were encouraged to visualize soothing yet empowering scenes inside their colons. One woman imagined her gut as a flowing, colorful scarf. Another saw her colon as a runaway train whose driver had gone to sleep. She took over the controls and slowed down the train to a comfortable speed. The results exceeded the researchers' expectations: More than 70% of the patients rated themselves "very much better" or "moderately better" after hypnotherapy. Five years later, 81% of patients who'd initially benefited from the treatment reported that the improvements had lasted. Their anxiety and depression were reduced by at least half, as were their reliance on pain pills and the number of doctor visits they made.
                                          
In another study, Olafur Palsson, PsyD, a clinical psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, reported an 80% success rate among 18 IBS patients who were treated with hypnosis after conventional care failed. Those results, coupled with several other recent studies on IBS and hypnosis, are remarkable, says psychologist Arreed Barabasz, PhD, director of the Hypnosis Laboratory at Washington State University and editor of the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. "These findings show that benefits of hypnotherapy for IBS are long lasting and that continued improvement after hypnosis treatment ends is the norm." http://www.ibshypnosis.com/
                                                 
Warts are uniquely vulnerable to hypnosis--it beats the usual treatment, salicylic acid, hands down. In a Tulane University study of 41 patients whose warts would not respond to other treatments, 80% were cured with hypnosis. Studies suggest that other skin conditions may also respond: In a trial of 18 patients, hypnotherapy cleared up eczema symptoms--itching, sleep disturbance, and stress--for up to 2 years.
                                              
Few examples of hypnotic healing are as dramatic as those that come from treating burns. Dabney Ewin, MD, a clinical professor of surgery and psychiatry at Tulane University School of Medicine, hypnotizes burn victims in the emergency room. Ewin's published case studies include a restaurant worker who burned his arm up to his elbow in a 370°F deep-fat fryer. The doctor induced a deep trance within 4 hours of the accident and provided hypnotic suggestion--"all your injured areas are cool and comfortable"--to the victim.  Ewin and others have shown that such care can slow or even stop the inflammation and blistering that can cause permanent damage. In the worker's case, the injury healed in 17 days with relatively little scarring. Ewin uses a series of slides to show examples of burns in which early intervention prevented serious, lifelong injuries.
                                 
Easing Pain..

                                                          
Work with burn victims demonstrates another benefit of hypnosis: It's an astoundingly powerful pain reliever, says David Patterson, PhD, chief psychologist at the University of Washington's Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, who co-published an extensive review of the topic in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin in 2003. "Hypnosis seems to be useful for virtually every clinical pain problem imaginable," he says. One of the biggest risks after a severe burn is infection, which can lead to scarring, amputation, or even death. To prevent that, nurses at burn units have to remove patients' dead skin every day for several weeks, even months, in a process called debridement. The pain is so severe, it can cause more anguish than the original burn. To ease it, patients are given morphine and other powerful pain relievers, but those drugs can be habit-forming and can cause confusion, gastrointestinal upset, and breathing trouble. At Seattle's Harborview Medical Center, Patterson has been using hypnosis for 20 years to make that pain bearable. His team of 10 psychologists teaches the most severely burned patients, who appear to benefit most from hypnosis, how to induce a state of relaxation and comfort. The session includes an instruction--called a posthypnotic suggestion--that cues the patient to feel the same level of comfort days, weeks, or even months later. A simple touch on the shoulder by a nurse, for example, if suggested in the original session, can trigger a trance, enabling a patient to undergo wound care without pain. "Hypnosis is very well suited for burn pain treatment," says Patterson, "because the pain is intense but short-lived, and you know when it's going to happen."
                                           
Pregnant women, too, have a pretty good sense of when the pain is going to start--and hypnosis has proven helpful in easing labor. Several studies, including a new one out of the University of Adelaide in Australia that surveyed 77 women who'd been hypnotized during delivery, have shown it can shorten labor time, reduce pain and the use of pain medication, decrease the risk of complications, and speed recovery. In the Australian study, hypnotized mothers were less likely than others to need an epidural or labor-inducing drugs. Some other reasons you might want to try it: Children born to hypnotized mothers scored higher on Apgar tests (a measure of health)--and the mothers were less prone to postpartum depression. What's more, those who have previously given birth without hypnosis tell doctors that it makes labor a more pleasant experience.
                                     
People with peptic ulcers may not know when pain will strike, but they can still use posthypnotic suggestion. Patients in a British study were able to regulate their secretion of gastric acid, so that only 53% experienced further pain, compared with 100% relapse in a control group.
                                                    
One in four Americans doesn't get regular dental care, or avoids dentists altogether, simply because of anxiety. Some dentists and oral surgeons assume that hypnosis takes too much time to be useful in their busy offices, but most patients can benefit with just 5 minutes of hypnosis-related relaxation training, says Al Forgione, PhD, a psychology professor at the Craniofacial Pain Center of the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine. The technique won't eliminate the need for Novocain, but it takes enough of the edge off to allow fearful dental patients to get the care they need.
                                          
Finally, there have been more studies on the effect of hypnosis on headaches than on any other form of chronic pain. It helps reduce the frequency, duration, and intensity of migraines and other headaches by as much as 30%.

Making Surgery Safer..

                                     
Robert Scott, 64, was hit by a truck when he was 4 years old, leaving him with a crushed bladder. Now, with a good-natured smile, the retired school custodian relies on hypnosis to cope with the minor but painful surgery he must routinely undergo. Scott comes to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston every 8 to 10 weeks to have a urinary catheter--which is attached to his kidney through a hole in his back--pulled out and replaced. While a team of doctors and nurses in green scrubs gathers surgical equipment and readies the massive, whirring, x-ray-guided scope overhead, Scott lies on his stomach, listening to the softly delivered instructions of Gloria Salazar, MD, a radiologist and hypnotherapist. She sits by Scott's head, encouraging him to relax and imagine a place he'd rather be. "Your body needs to be here," she says gently. "But you do not." She reads to him from a script used on all hypnosis patients at the hospital. Scott closes his hazel eyes, takes a series of deep breaths, and seems to drift off to sleep. As doctors insert a long guide wire into his back, Scott doesn't flinch. When they fish the 12-inch catheter out of his kidney and guide a new one down in its place, he doesn't seem to even notice.
                                              
"With other patients, we use intravenous pain medication," says attending radiologist Salomao Faintuch, MD, as he pulls the tube out. "But we know Mr. Scott responds well to hypnosis, so we use only local anesthesia." Sedatives such as Valium and morphine prolong operations and can cause complications, Faintuch adds, so it's better to do without, if the patient can handle it. Scott can handle it because he's whisked his mind far away from the doctors probing deep inside his body. "I have a meadow that I go to, and there's a pond, which I put ducks on," he says after Salazar guides him back to full consciousness with a re-awakening cue. "I take my granddaughter fishing. We talk and play." Five years ago, when he got intravenous sedation instead of hypnosis, Scott says, "it felt like someone took a piece of steel and stuck it right into my kidney." Now, he says: "I feel a lot of pressure, but no pain." Does the meadow really exist? "No." Does the grand-daughter? "Oh, yes," he says with a smile. "But she's only 2 months old."
                                          
This is no ordinary hospital ward, but then its director, Elvira Lang, MD, is not your average administrator. Lang, a radiologist and Harvard Medical School professor, has transformed the interventional radiology department at Beth Israel Deaconess--where MRI’s, x-rays, and ultrasounds are used in unclogging arteries and shrinking tumors--into a 24-hour, hypnosis-on-request unit. Virtually any patient, undergoing nearly any procedure, can receive hypnosis-induced pain relief within minutes. ("We don't always use the 'H' word when we talk to patients," Faintuch confesses, "because they think of people on TV who do silly things. So we say relaxation exercises.")

In 2000, Lang published a groundbreaking study on surgical hypnosis that many physicians credit with helping to legitimize the technique's role in the operating room. The study traced the outcomes of 241 patients randomly assigned to receive hypnosis,  standard anesthesia, or sympathetic (but non-hypnotic) care while undergoing minor surgery. Lang and her colleagues found that patients who were guided through hypnotic relaxation during surgery used 50% less pain and anti-anxiety medication, suffered 75% fewer complications, and left the operating room 17 minutes sooner than the other groups. In a follow-up study, Lang found that hypnosis is a cost saver, too--halving the $638 sedation costs of minor surgery. Lang suspects that hypnosis helps patients tolerate operations by stabilizing heart rate and blood pressure. She's looking to see if it can substitute for sedation in women undergoing needle biopsies for suspected breast cancer, women having uterine fibroid surgery, and patients receiving chemotherapy for malignant liver tumors. The studies, funded by the federal government, are not yet complete, but Lang says the preliminary results are encouraging.
                                 
Elsewhere, doctors have recorded great success using hypnosis on patients undergoing complicated, high-risk surgery. At Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, doctors use hypnosis to reduce pain and nausea among epilepsy patients who have electrodes placed inside their skulls to detect the source of their seizures. At the University of California Davis Medical Center, doctors didn't even need to formally hypnotize spinal surgery patients in order to limit their blood loss during the operation. They simply told 41 patients that blood would flow away from their backs during spine surgery. These patients lost roughly 650 cc of blood on the operating table; others on standard sedation lost nearly twice that.
                               
Relieving Cancer Symptoms..

                                     
David Spiegel, MD, a psychiatry professor at Stanford University and a leading researcher on medical hypnosis, has found that the approach can help some patients with terminal cancer live longer and more comfortably. Spiegel studied 125 women with metastatic breast cancer. Those who learned self-hypnosis techniques had 50% less pain than women receiving standard care--and lived, on average, 1 1/2 years longer. Part of the reason may be that the nausea, anxiety, and all-around lousy feelings induced by chemotherapy can be alleviated by hypnosis, several studies have shown. Boris Lavanovich, 51, a real estate consultant in Ludlow, VT, used hypnosis to cope with an experimental chemotherapy regimen he took to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a lethal blood cancer. "They told me I was stage 4, out the door," Lavanovich says with a dry chuckle. The mountain biker and skier needed medication to counteract nausea, convulsive shakes, and rapid temperature swings brought on by chemotherapy. Without the self-hypnosis training, Lavanovich doubts he could've tolerated the treatment or that he would have benefited.
                             
Lavanovich's experience is one hypnotherapists see time and again: A patient has only to try the technique to become a believer. That's what happened with Wendy, the skeptical nurse who used the therapy to conceive her first son. She had a second without incident, but when she and her husband decided to try for number three, once again her periods vanished. This time she didn't hesitate: She turned to hypnosis, imagining the waterfall and soft breeze that got her body back on track the first time around. It worked--she's now the mother of four sons.

Taken from an article by:                
DR. ROBERTA TEMES MEDICAL RESEARCH.
                                      
Hypnosis is the original mind/body medicine and every year many clinical trials are conducted to prove the usefulness of hypnosis in specific situations. Here are some recent outcomes:
                           
Would you take a pill that promised to speed you through surgery? Would you take a pill that's been tested on hundreds of surgical patients and all but one of them maintained stable vital signs during their operation - no sudden high blood pressure - and all needed far less pain medication than patients who did not take the pill-much reduced pain after surgery, and there's more. The surgeons were able to complete the operation quicker in the patients who had the pill. I suspect if there were such a pill every HMO would insist upon it. After all, they'd save money on medications and on time spent in the operating room. The 'pill' that's been proved to have this effect is hypnosis!
                                               
In the April 29, 2000 edition of the scholarly medical journal, the Lancet, Dr. Elvira Lang of Harvard University published her study of clinical trials using hypnosis before surgery. People who had been hypnotized prior to surgery needed less pain medication, left the operating room sooner, and had more stable vital signs during their operation.
                                            
Prior to surgery twenty-six children were hypnotized and twenty-six others, who were the same age and having the same surgery, were not hypnotized. The hypnosis group was taught self-hypnosis (guided imagery) and given the hypnotic suggestion that they would recover easily and quickly. After all the children were recovered it was determined that those who had been hypnotized had less pain, needed fewer pain killers, and went home days earlier than those in the non-hypnosis group. Also, those in the hypnosis group were calm, while those in the other group were anxious, even after the surgery. This study was done by Sally Lambert at the Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.
                                                                          
Before having dental surgery patients listened to a 20-minute hypnosis audiotape. The tape put them into a hypnotic state and then told them that during the procedure they would be able to control bleeding from their gums, they would heal rapidly, and would easily cope with pain. Patients were told to listen to their tape every day for one week prior to the surgery. The dental surgeon performed similar operations on patients who listened to the tape and patients who were not given a tape. The dentist did not know which patients had tapes and which did not. After the surgery it was determined that patients who had been hypnotically prepared experienced less anxiety, and needed much less pain medication. This study proves that a properly designed audiotape can be an effective intervention. This study was conducted by Bjorn Enqviast, DDS, in Stockholm, Sweden.
                                           
Patients who were healthy, but had a broken bone in their foot, were recruited from an orthopedic emergency room. They all received regular orthopedic care, but half of them were given hypnosis, too. The hypnosis consisted of individual sessions and a hypnosis audio tape to be played at home. After 9 weeks, x-rays and clinical assessments of the foot showed that the patients who were hypnotized were healing faster. The hypnotized patients had improved ankle mobility, an easier time walking down stairs, and had a decreased need for painkillers. Hypnosis can be used to enhance fracture healing. This study is from: C.S.Ginandes Dept. of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School Cambridge, MA

Patients with migraine headaches had a group hypnosis session and then were given pre-recorded self-hypnosis tapes to take home. On the self-hypnosis tapes they were given imagery of wearing a helmet that was very cold because it had freezer coils inside it. They were also taught how to relax themselves using hypnosis. Before joining this research study all the patients agreed to keep written records for three months. During those three months they listed every migraine they had and how long it lasted, how severe it was, and how much medication they needed. For three months the patients listened to their hypnosis tapes, which put them into a hypnotic state. At the end of three months the data from the first three months was compared to the data of the three months during which they used self-hypnosis.
                                                         
* During those last three months:

* The headaches occurred less often

* When the headaches did appear they went away quicker

* The headaches were less severe

* Medication use was cut in half

Hypnosis is an effective treatment for migraine headaches.

A study of children with trichotillomania appeared in the medical journal, Acta Paediatrica, 88 (4) pp. 407-410. Children who were hypnotized to stop pulling their hair remained able to refrain from doing so for 16 months, after just a few hypnotic sessions. The authors, H. Cohen, A. Barzilal, and E. Lahat at the Pediatric Ambulatory Center, in Petach Tikva, Israel, suggest that doctors consider hypnosis and not medication as the primary treatment for compulsive hair pulling.

Dr. Whorwell, University Hospital of South Manchester, in the United Kingdom. Research was done to determine the effectiveness of hypnosis in treating trichotillomania, compulsive hair pulling, in children. The children were hypnotized and then taught self-hypnosis so they could re-hypnotize themselves at home on a daily basis. The children who had trichotillomania without depression recovered well. Those who had depression were only partially successful. This study was done by Dr. Daniel Kohen, University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome,  (IBS), were treated with hypnosis. Eighty two percent of the patients improved. Patients were less anxious, had less abdominal pain, less bloating, less constipation and less gas. Even those patients who were not very hypnotizable had good results. Hypnosis is an effective treatment for irritable bowel syndrome. For more information, please contact: Dr. Edward Blanchard Center for Stress and Anxiety Disorders1535 Western Avenue Albany, NY 12203.

Fifty patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, (IBS), were asked to fill out questionnaires about their symptoms. Half of the patients were hypnotized and half were not. After a few months new questionnaires determined that the patients who had been hypnotized had less abdominal pain, less bloating, less nausea, less gas pain, and fewer backaches. Additionally, the hypnotized patients said they felt more in control of their lives and did not call in sick as often as they did before having the hypnosis. Also, they did not need to visit their doctors as often as they did before the hypnosis. The patients in the study who did not receive hypnosis did not show these improvements. This study proves that hypnosis not only relieves symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, but also improves quality of life for those patients. This study was conducted by Dr. Whorwell, University Hospital of South Manchester, in the United Kingdom.

Pregnant women who begin to go into labor long before their ninth month are said to have pre-term labor. Patients who had pre-term labor were hypnotized and given suggestions to keep their cervix firm and hard to hold the baby in the uterus. Hypnosis was continued until the contractions stopped. Patients were seen for hypnosis two or three times each day and then given audiotapes to play several times a day. Seventy percent of the hypnotized patients were able to prolong their pregnancies. Only twenty percent of the women who were not hypnotized were able to prolong their pregnancies. Hypnosis can help prevent premature births. Dr. Donald Brown, Nova Scotia, Canada, can be reached at: Dcbrown@is.dal.ca                                                

Hypnosis has been used to help bereaved people get through mourning. In this article a widow is treated with hypnosis. Hypnotic relaxation is recommended for the first stages of grief, then supportive suggestions, and finally a new way to look at her relationship with her husband is recommended. All the above is done with the aid of hypnosis, and then the patient is hypnotized to strengthen her ego and look toward the future. Hypnosis is an effective tool in bereavement counseling. Dr. Gary Elkins is the author of this paper. He can be reached at: gelkins@bellnet.tamu.edu
                                                                                                               
Severely burned patients were hypnotized to feel less pain, in addition to
receiving their regular dosages of morphine and other pain medications. The patients who most benefited from hypnosis were those who were in the most pain. Hypnosis worked best when it was administered by the hypnotist and didn’t work as well when the patient was told to rely on self-hypnosis. Hypnosis is an effective adjunct to treatment in burn patients. This study was done by Dr. David Patterson at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington.

Patients suffering from psoriasis were hypnotized and some patients had quite an improvement. The patients who improved were those who were very hypnotizable. Those who were moderately hypnotizable did not improve. Hypnosis may be useful with psoriasis patients who are very hypnotizable. For more information, please contact: Dr. Francisco Tausk Department of Dermatology Johns Hopkins School of Medicine 601 N. Caroline Street, Baltimore, MD 21287.

Use ‘Integrative Medicine’

“Plenty of studies now show that integrative medicine works very well. By that I mean the practice of medicine that reaffirms the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient, and has a broader scope that includes therapies from conventional bio-scientific medicine, as well as newer complementary approaches like acupuncture and chiropractic. For example, a study conducted at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York found that when women participated in a hypnosis session before breast surgery, they required less pain medication and experienced less nausea and emotional upset than the control group. Patients in the hypnosis group also cost the hospital $772 less overall. That’s an example of how a simple technique can help patients and reduce costs.”

Woodson Merrell, M.D., chairman, department of integrative medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center, New York.

THE HEALING POWER OF HYPNOSIS:

Hypnosis: Hocus pocus it's not.
By Jean Callahan -  Edited and reprinted from

YOUR HEALTH August 19, 1997, pages 27-30.

                    
For starters, how about surgery without anesthesia?
                     
There was nothing remarkable about Victor Rausch's gallbladder operation. Nothing at all except that he underwent the surgery without so much as swallowing an aspirin. Rausch, then a young dentist from Waterloo, Ontario, wanted to see if he could skip the anesthetic and rely on hypnosis to keep him relaxed and free of pain while his gallbladder was removed.
                
AS THE SURGEON sliced into his abdomen, Rausch entered into a hypnotic trance, focusing on Chopin's lush Nocturne in E-flat as it was played in the film The Eddy Duchin Story. He visualized scenes in the movie, enlisting sight and sound to swaddle his mind in a virtual reality infinitely more appealing than the one he was living at the moment. Throughout the 75 minute operation, Rausch maintained steady blood pressure and pulse rate; he even talked and joked with the surgical team. And implausible as it may seem, he swears he felt no pain--only a little tugging. After the surgery was over he stood up, walked down the hall and rode the elevator to his hospital room.
                       
SOUND LIKE a medical parlor trick? Yes, surgery without anesthesia is a bit of a mind-bender. But the truth is, even in its less startling applications, hypnosis still evokes the image of its sideshow past. Just murmur, You are getting sleepy, very sleepy, and some people envision one of those 1950's mad-doc movies in which creepy old men hypnotize lovely young women to do all sorts of things.
                                    
NEVERTHELESS, as researchers learn more about the mind-body connection, hypnosis is ever so quietly becoming part of mainstream medicine. Doctors and therapists often use hypnosis to help people quit smoking, lose weight, manage stress, diminish pain and overcome phobias-- some of the more typical uses of the method. Health maintenance organizations and major insurers are generally willing to pay. In addition, patients are also being taught self-hypnosis to ward off asthma attacks and epileptic seizures; hemophiliacs are using it to stop their own bleeding; and last summer, after reviewing the medical literature, the National Institutes of Health concluded that the technique is effective for easing several kinds of discomfort, including headaches and pain associated with cancer. It's easy to imagine the advantages. Once you become proficient at hypnotizing yourself, you can do it anywhere and anytime. There are no side effects. And it doesn't cost a dime. Such control is a powerful tonic for many patients, even when hypnosis is used as an adjunct to conventional remedies.
                          
So how does this healing method work? How do you know if it will work for you? Except for lack of props, current techniques aren't all that different from those of early practitioners. Whether through counting backwards from 100 or asking the patient to concentrate on a peaceful setting, the goal is to relax the body while creating a state of mental awareness that makes it easy to assimilate therapeutic suggestions. An addicted smoker might be told to imagine h/herself as a nonsmoker, going through daily activities without a cigarette; a frustrated dieter might be encouraged to imagine h/herself thin and trim in a new swimsuit, eating only foods that are healthy.
                
ACCORDING TO electronic tracings of brain waves of people undergoing hypnosis, there is a surge of theta waves, which are associated with enhanced attention. That may explain why suggestions introduced during this state are particularly effective: The mind has tuned out everything else and is focusing exclusively on the new idea.
                                 
OF COURSE, HELPING people kick bad habits is one thing; if they are not trained in self hypnosis, getting them to take a surgical incision without anesthesia is quite another. However, Helen Crawford, a psychology professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, says the sensation of pain is like any other mental process that can be controlled to some degree. Indeed her tests of people experiencing hypnosis--she's been mapping brain waves and measuring cerebral blood flow--have shown increased activity in the brain's frontal region, which is known to inhibit sensory information. Pain still registers in other areas of the brain, but the hyped-up frontal cortex blocks its ascent into consciousness. Brain maps or no, it's precisely this squishy, is-it-or-isn't-it proposition that keeps some people from taking hypnosis seriously. Think hard and you, too, can learn to ignore excruciating pain.  Or more troubling: If it continues to hurt, perhaps you're not tough-minded enough. These suggestive statements are giving the wrong message to the brain and therefore produce more P AIN. When the methods are properly used they work. Proponents insist, it doesn't really matter whether the pain no longer occurs or the mind just shields you from it. Either way, you don't feel it!
                        
Some people do feel it, however, because they are not as receptive as other individuals. Artists and writers often make good subjects because they are comfortable with fantasy and learning new things, says Herbert Spiegel, a psychiatrist and one of the foremost experts on the medical uses of hypnosis. Yet many practitioners believe motivation is as important as innate capacity. Anyone can be conditioned to use hypnosis effectively, if they have normal intelligence.
                                
PERHAPS TH AT'S why people in acute medical crises are particularly responsive to hypnotic suggestion. This is where the miracles happen, says Marcia Greenleaf, assistant clinical professor of psychology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Over the years, Greenleaf has seen many patients in the cardiac intensive care unit with heart rates as high as 190 beats per minute. With hypnosis, they are often able to stabilize their condition within minutes, without using medications.
                             
Burn recovery can be another of those wondrous turnabouts, says Dabney Ewin, a clinical professor of surgery and psychiatry at Tulane Medical School. His most startling case involved a 28-year-old factory worker whose leg had slipped into a vat of molten aluminum heated to approximately 1,750 degrees F.

EWIN, THEN THE PLANT physician, hypnotized him almost immediately. He told him that his leg felt "cool and comfortable," and the man said that indeed that was how it felt. What's more, after additional treatment in the emergency room, the burned skin healed much faster and better than physicians had anticipated, without infection and without forming any scar tissue. The desire for long-term results also can serve as motivation, and experts say that with training and practice almost anyone can use hypnosis for simple healing purposes. In a study sponsored by the government's Office of Alternative Medicine, Crawford taught 17 people to use the technique to ease backache. In the laboratory, subjects reduced pain sensation by more than 80 percent. At home they felt significantly less depressed and were able to sleep better at night.

For Robert Jackson, a retired jet engine mechanic in Ft. Worth, Texas, hypnosis ended two years of torturous pain. As a consequence of radiation treatments he had undergone in 1993, Jackson's esophagus was so badly scarred that eating had become almost unbearable. He ended up on a feeding tube, which left him feeling hungry all the time.

HE WAS CURIOUS ABOUT HYPNOTHER APY, but the first physician he approached scoffed at the idea. Eventually Jackson wound up at the Center for Pain Management in Fort Worth. There, he says a doctor showed him the ropes. I learned to put my mind someplace else, he says, so the pain, though still real, wouldn't dominate his experience. It took a while, but he is now so adept at hypnotizing himself that he goes into a trance almost instantly. “I have three children, and I'm relatively a young man at 50”, he says. "But two years ago all I could do is sit around and cry. I still have pain, and I still take drugs every once and a while, but my suffering is greatly reduced. Best of all, I can actually eat real food now. Sometimes, I even feel full.”