A LETTER

To the Editor of The Los Angeles Times:

It is encouraging to see that the many benefits of hypno-healing are being recognized by the scientific community and The Los Angeles Times (Hypnotic reach, Benedict Carey, January 5 2004).

NOTE: Article appears after this letter.

However, when considering reports of these scientific studies it is important to understand that the potential of human consciousness in healing changes constantly, and if we are to get the most out of this exciting field, we need new models for looking at how the mind and emotions affect health and healing.

It would be of great public value to fund several outcome studies that compare the effectiveness of hypnosis when practiced by MD's and PhD's vs. the effectiveness of hypnosis when practiced by non-medical certified hypnosis professionals. I am confident that the results would give ten of thousands of well trained hypnosis practitioners the opportunity to take their rightful place within the healthcare community.

Meanwhile, The International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapy Association (IMDHA) is an excellent referral service for Certified Medical Hypnotherapists.

Michael Ellner

Doctors find recovery is aided by helping patients into healing trances

By Benedict Carey
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 5, 2004

Hypnosis transports some people beyond serenity and absorption to a state of pure silliness. A solemn voice whispering to relax, breathe deeply and imagine a waterfall can bring to mind high school séances, Ouija boards, Woody Allen routines.

Yet the very same technique, the same voice, can move others to climb mountains. After a fall on a climbing expedition that mangled her ankles, Priscilla Morton, a 48-year-old New Orleans social worker and mountaineer, discovered that she was afraid to step off the curb and onto the street, much less climb again.

Using a program of hypnosis, she was able to ascend to the 19,347-foot summit of Mt. Cotopaxi in Ecuador. Self-hypnosis "was the only way I could deal with the fear, the cold, the steepness, the exhaustion," Morton said.

Once mainly the province of entertainers, mystics and New Age healers, hypnosis is now gaining a foothold in mainstream medicine. At teaching hospitals such as those at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and Harvard Medical School, hypnotists work with some surgical patients to help speed recovery. Many of the country's 1,000 or so certified hypnotherapists now get referrals from physicians on cases ranging from irritable bowel syndrome and heart disease to managing the pain of childbirth and cancer. In some studies, 50% to 70% of people who have tried it say hypnosis has helped them to feel better or heal faster. Such reports have encouraged its use for everything from weight loss to smoking cessation, with varying results.

But is the evidence strong enough to justify sessions that can cost $100? Most doctors are skeptical. For every person who learns to manage chronic pain, they say, several others manage only a yawn or a shrug. To earn widespread respect, hypnotherapists are going to have to reach more people, more consistently. "At this point, the therapy is certainly not well accepted by most physicians and surgeons," said Guy Montgomery, an assistant professor of biobehavioral medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

The answer may be to teach hypnotizability, or suggestibility, as it's sometimes called. In more than a dozen studies over the last decade, men and women of various ages demonstrated they could learn to fall into a hypnotic trance more easily and deeply.

"Now the idea is to find what is most effective in getting them there, from a low level of suggestibility to a higher one," said Steven Lynn, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton who's conducting a large federally funded study on the subject. "You do that and you not only increase the number of people who would benefit but also widen the range of its applications."

The hypnotic state

Researchers long thought that suggestibility was a stable trait, like a person's IQ or leaping ability, that couldn't be improved on much. Yet there's little evidence that it's related to innate gullibility or a person's imaginative powers. Personality isn't a deciding factor either; researchers have found no strong relationships between hypnotic suggestibility and traits such as neuroticism, extroversion or intellectual curiosity.

Attitude does seem to matter — in particular, skepticism — and for good reason. Since an Austrian physician named Franz Mesmer first popularized the use of trance-like states as a method of treating anxiety and hysteria in the 18th century, the technique has appealed to all variety of charlatans and healers, as well as to Hollywood scriptwriters, who've had fun using it to brainwash, possess and otherwise manipulate characters and plot. Movies such as "Whirlpool" (1949), "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) and almost any Dracula film have defined hypnosis in the public imagination as a form of demonic mind control, and that image itself may undermine people's hypnotizability.

So psychologists trying to teach hypnotic suggestibility often start with a simple explanation of what hypnosis is and what it's not. Being hypnotized does not turn a person into an automaton or a puppet, for instance; almost always it's a mundane experience, as familiar as a daydream.

The therapist might have a person simply stare at a spot on the wall, for instance, then gradually relax, feeling his or her arms getting lighter and lighter, as if the bones were hollow, say, as if connected to helium balloons. Highly hypnotizable people often are best at demystifying the trance. "You're not losing control, like in the movies," said climber Morton, who described her experiences in a recent issue of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis. "It's more like you drift off a little. You're temporarily distracted by a particular image or lost in thought, like when you drive home from work and arrive without remembering how you got there. It's a very natural state, the kind we go into all the time, and it helps to think of it that way."

In several studies, research psychologists have found that a straightforward description of the sensations and images that occur during hypnosis can also help skeptics and other trance resistors become more suggestible.

In his ongoing project, Lynn shows volunteers a videotape of highly hypnotizable people explaining their sensations and what they thought about while in a trance. On one video clip, a hypnotist has a subject clasp his hands together and then imagine they're welded together. The hypnotized man suddenly cannot separate his hands; they're stuck. "If I stopped imagining and admitted to myself that they could come apart, then of course I could have made them come apart," he explains afterward on the tape. "But I figured that's not the point of the suggestion. The point is to get involved in the make-believe, no matter what. So, I just kept imagining that my hands were welded blocks of steel and did this until the suggestion was over."

Using imaging technology, neuroscientists have taken pictures of people's brains during hypnosis. The snapshots show a decrease of arousal in the cortex, the brain's manager and planner, and an increase of activity in areas involved in focusing attention. This makes some sense to psychologists who practice and study hypnosis.

While in the trance, a person is usually concentrating on bringing to mind some vivid image, which could account for heightened attention. The drop in cortical arousal accompanies a decline in moment-to-moment alertness. In effect, psychologists say, the person is conscious enough to hear and understand suggestions such as "You will feel strong and healthy after surgery" or "You will feel calm and relaxed when taking the test," without applying his or her usual skepticism or irony. If the suggestions are helpful, the theory goes, they may become a part of the person's subconscious memory.

"This is all happening beneath the level of consciousness, so the suggestions are not something the person has to think about or remember," said Marc Schoen, a Los Angeles psychologist and assistant clinical professor at the UCLA School of Medicine who has used hypnosis for more than 20 years.

Patient control

Like other therapists who specialize in hypnosis, Schoen has treated everything from social anxiety to pain from cancer and cancer treatment. Typically, he works with people once a week for six to eight weeks. When effective, the therapy blunts emotional over-reactions to a particular person, situation or drug side effect, say, that normally would intensify pain, interrupt sleep or otherwise trigger anxiety. With practice, many people learn to do this on their own. In effect, they adapt the therapist's methods to put themselves into a brief trance, reinforcing suggestions or thoughts they've found helpful during a session — self-hypnosis.

Schoen may also use traditional cognitive therapy, in which people learn to consciously identify these same emotional triggers, then avoid them altogether (if possible) or calm themselves before getting upset. But when hypnosis is successful, he said, no conscious mental effort is necessary to short-circuit a painful emotional reaction. "It just doesn't happen; you don't feel the same fear, the same apprehension," he said. "In that sense, it's a form of desensitization."

Henry Polic II, a movie and TV actor in his 50s best known for his work in the 1980s series "Webster," got a referral to Schoen last summer during treatment for malignant skin cancer. Polic was on a drug and radiation regimen that caused a paralyzing nausea, plus swelling blisters in his mouth so severe that he had trouble speaking and swallowing. While hypnotized, the actor imagined himself in Key West, Fla., at sunset, as he remembered it from a vacation years ago. Meanwhile, Schoen was informing him that the water washing on the sand was clearing his body of illness and relaxing his tissues. It took a few sessions, but the swelling dropped by about half, Polic estimated, and the blisters near the back of his throat disappeared. "Gone, and I mean gone; I could swallow again," he said. "I have no idea how that happened, but it did."

Nor does anyone else know. Distraction may play an important role, some doctors say. It's well known, for instance, that the brain can virtually shut down pain signals when preoccupied; many athletes and soldiers have known the surprise of suddenly discovering a cut or wound once the fray is over, well after suffering the injury. If nothing else, those who respond to hypnosis have learned to escape into their imaginations for a time. But there's more going on, and many psychologists argue that it has to do with the placebo effect, the self-fulfilling belief that a condition has been treated.

In 1995, a team of researchers from the University of Connecticut reviewed six weight-loss studies that compared the effect of cognitive therapy — identifying eating triggers and defusing them — with and without hypnosis. About 70% of the overweight people who got hypnosis lost more weight and kept it off longer than those who got only talk therapy.

In a 2002 look at 20 studies on hypnosis and surgical pain, Mount Sinai researchers found that adding hypnosis to standard post-surgical care sped recovery almost 90% of the time, in terms of levels of pain, anxiety and the need for painkillers.

"The hypnosis seems to change expectations, in the same way that a placebo does," said Montgomery, an author on both studies, "and this change appears to have a strong effect on what people actually experience."

Montgomery, like other psychologists, is now running a study of hypnosis on people undergoing surgery, in this case breast cancer patients. On the day before surgery, a trained hypnotist puts the patients into a trance for about 15 minutes, telling them that they'll feel "healthy, full of energy, strong," after their operations.

The motivation factor

There's reason to believe that even a very short — i.e. relatively inexpensive — approach could lessen a patient's pain and drug use after surgery, psychologists say. For whatever their personal views of hypnosis, people awaiting surgery have one thing going for them that many others don't: motivation. It doesn't take a psychologist to explain why people going under the knife have tremendous anxiety, not only about the success of the operation but also about complications and recovery. They long for hypnosis to work.

"You have to really want to do what the hypnotist is suggesting you do, for obvious reasons," said psychologist Lynn. His preliminary results suggest that most people on the low end of the suggestibility scale can learn to be two to three times more hypnotizable than before, once they overcome skepticism and resistance to imagining and they establish a rapport with the therapist.

For cancer patient Polic, hypnosis has helped make the difference between living in misery and leading an active life, with the luxury of being able to laugh now and then. He doesn't feel like a million bucks, but his skin isn't burning and he's not crippled with nausea. Using CDs of recorded hypnotism sessions, he has learned to put himself into a brief trance when needed, when side effects flare.

"I was never a skeptic of hypnosis, but I'm amazed so far at what a difference it has made," he said. He is due for another round of drug therapy today. On Thursday, he's scheduled for another hypnosis session. "I'm headed back to Key West."

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

INTRODUCTION

As I write, there are tens of millions of Americans out there, people who are stuck and urgently need help. The bad news is that most of these people aren’t even seeking help. People from all walks of life, are suffering from a wide range of stress related symptoms including: sleeplessness, nightmares, digestive difficulties, feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, anxiety, panic attacks and an inability to get on with their lives and they are literally doing nothing about it. A bit of good news is that some of these tens of millions of people out there, are seeking help and within this group, there is a vast market of people who are actually longing for safe and effective alternative approaches to conventional mental health care professionals. They are fed up with costly “experts” that diagnose, analyze and drug them, but grossly fail to actually help them resolve their symptoms and get on with their lives. . .

I am confident that “ten of ten” conventional experts feel uncomfortable about the fact that millions of our fellow Americans are seeking and using Alternatives to conventional medical and/or psychological care. But whether they like it or not, Alternative Health has become mainstream!

The really bad news is that most of the people who are seeking alternative help, are people who are willing to try just about any healing technique or system, that might help them get their lives back, short of being hypnotized.

Which again, is why I am sponsoring this discussion, now.

As all of you reading this know: HYPNOSIS IS BOTH SAFE AND EFFECTIVE. So why are people afraid of being hypnotized? Because in the public's mind, hypnosis is synonymous with losing control. (They believe they must lose control to be hypnotized.) Ironically, cultural and social trances like these are the glues that bind hypnosis and losing control in the public's mind.

For example, people are okay about closing their eye lids. They are not alarmed about taking a few deep breaths and becoming at ease with their surroundings. They can enjoy using their imaginations and actually appreciate unwinding and becoming relaxed as they unwind and relax. People can get into using affirmations and positive imagery which is why many of these people are working with practitioners who offer “Guided Imagery”, Therapuetic Visualizations”, “Guided Meditations” or ”NeuroLinguistic” techniques. Keep in mind that the people I am talking about, are people who remain very much afraid of being “put under - and losing control”. They are happy to work with people who are in fact knowingly and/or often unknowingly hypnotizing them. As long as they are unaware that they are being hypnotized - they are able to feel in control. But these are people who won’t even consider working with a “HYPNOSIS Professional” because, they have unknowingly self-hypnotized themselves into associating being hypnotized with losing control. Which is why the Hypnosis Profession urgently needs an image make-over.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Send your replies to my e-mail. Please keep your input brief (250 words maximum), concise and respectful and let’s see if we can explore and discover new and improved ways to practice and market our Hypnotic services.

COMING SOON:

Ellner.info will ask the question:
Is Conventional Trance Induction: A Necessary Piece of Hypnotic Practice or An Unnecessary Relic of Hypnotic practice?

The State of the World

by Mark Sircus Ac., OMD
worldpsychology.net/

It is most typical in our world today to deny reality in any and every way we can. When our world seems to be falling apart many cope by pretending that it's not, thus reality sneaks up from behind even though clear trends are well visible. There are painful realities to be confronted in life on individual and collective levels. It is unfortunate but true that people prefer to deny both their feelings and reality and this lands us in a whole lot of trouble. David Reynolds, an American exponent of Japanese Morita psychotherapy said, "People deny reality. They fight against real feelings caused by real circumstances. They build mental worlds of shoulds, oughts, and might-have-beens. Real changes begin with real appraisal and acceptance of what is. Then realistic action is possible."

What is coming in the future, where is the world headed and what effect is it going to have on our own and our children's lives? It seems we are collectively walking a most treacherous road and the great hope lies in us being honest and open about it. Some people mistakenly believe that Americans are the best-informed people in the history of the world. But how can this be when they are experts at distancing themselves from any real unpleasantness. It is assumed by many that Americans behave as though they bear no responsibility for the deep human suffering around them, and thus no obligation to try and alleviate it. Life really is not that amusing these days and Americans seem to be the least informed about it or the least caring. After all the stock market is up over 10,000 but no financial market is going to change the fact that something's going on with the basic fabric of our society and the global environment of the world.

The Institute for Innovation in Social Policy at the Fordham University Graduate Center in Tarrytown, N.Y., which publishes the Index of Social Health every year, showed the social health of the nation taking a "steep" dive. There are now more homeless people in America than ever before, more families without homes or food, increases in child abuse, average weekly earnings are down, affordable housing more scarce, health insurance coverage is diminishing, and the gap between rich and poor, already at obscenely high levels, now more obscene than ever. "It's the greatest number of homeless since the Great Depression," said Patrick Markee, a policy analyst with the Coalition for the Homeless. On climate levels we see icecaps and glaciers melting at surprising rates as temperatures continue to warm. And approximately one in seven, almost a billion people are going to go to bed hungry.

On every level we see deterioration. The level of violence and terror around the world has also increased with perhaps the worst horror now being reported out of Guatemala City where approximately 700 young women have been abducted, brutally tortured, raped and killed, consistently in that sequence, for no apparent reason in the last three years; and the authorities are still at a loss to find who is destroying the very fabric of humanity in the area. Western society and western medicine together with capitalism is demonstrating itself in a nasty way even as economies are saved for yet another year as America borrows yet again another cool trillion from the future. Suicide bombing has become almost an everyday occurrence on the world scene, and rape and robberies have become so numerous and common that reporting them is not worth the paper on which to print the stories.

Everything is upside down in today's world. As MICHAEL ELLNER put it, "Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality." Governments pretend there is no problem with global warming as the UN reports that 150,000 die from the heat in 2003, pharmacies compete with the local pushers, and on top of it all we find that most of the drugs we take do not work. In such an upside down world is there any hope for the future? If our major institutions are failing us and we continue to drug ourselves out on our favourite electronic addiction called TV, what can we expect for the New Year and the years that are coming? The head is reining supreme over the collective nature of our hearts and thus the soul and the body of humanity are at risk. The state of the world can be painted any which way the spin makers want but those who have eyes to see perceive the deception. Reality is frightening and it is falling like an avalanche on the human collective. No wonder drug sales are up.

Of course the worst news is what is happening to our children. Way back in 1995 Daniel Goleman reported in his groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence that a sea of change was apparent in our children. They, our love and hope for the future are doing quite badly and are suffering from an "emotional malaise which seems to be a universal price of modern life for children," Goleman said. All around the world we are seeing a steady slide in the quality of life for children with them suffering from increased feelings of isolation, withdrawal from the world, unhappiness, anxiousness, depression, attention deficits, learning disabilities, and deep increases in aggressiveness. Urie Bronfenbrenner, the eminent Cornell University developmental psychologist said, "external stresses have become so great that even strong families are falling apart."

Such comments about the state of the world are valid and can be very discouraging; however fear is the one thing that will bring our downfall if we allow it to take over our thinking. "I believe we all need to remember our circles of influence are bigger than we imagine," wrote psychologist Dr. Margaret A. MacLeod. There are many reasons for hope though for anyone who is willing to appreciate the wonder that is present in our lives. When we have life and love we can transcend the darkness and actually even do something about it. If we do right for ourselves and our loved ones it is likely that we will make a positive contribution to the world. We remain the primary force that affects our lives one way or another but the world is calling us. It's in need of heroes, lots of them who can work together to beat back the forces of darkness by being warriors of the light. We cannot sit back in peace like the Tibetans waiting for disaster to strike; for the list of human insanities in government, medicine, economics, and ecology to fall like an avalanche cutting off the lives of our children. The great hope of the human race lies in people getting together to effect changes on the inside and out. Any small group of highly individualized beings that work together as one integrated entity become spiritually very powerful, they can change the world. In this lies our true vision of hope, the dream of a light so bright that the darkness and insanity can no longer prevail.