APPLICATION OF MEDICAL HYPNOSIS IS A TREND USED WHERE FEW OTHER ANSWERS ARE AVAILABLE

 Medical hypnosis is quite different from the "command performance" of stage hypnosis, an activity that depended heavily on the practitioner's ability to quickly select from an audience those subjects who could be readily hypnotized. Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention (trance) in which external stimuli are blocked and suggestion becomes far more effective than usual. The fundamental usefulness of hypnosis in medicine and healing has been controversial for more than 200 years, ie, since Anton Mesmer produced the body of work now recognized as the beginning of clinical hypnosis. Does medical hypnosis work? If so, how? Does it produce real bodily healing at the physiologic level, or is its therapeutic effect merely the result of imagined comfort--and thus to be found in the mind only?

Hypnosis has proved beneficial in many medical situations including but not limited to: chronic headache, chronic back pain, psychogenic weakness or paralysis, chronic constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, panic attacks, and phobias. Dr Milton Erickson--physician, psychotherapist, teacher, and arguably the consummate medical hypnotherapist of the 20th century--emphasized the need for practitioners to individualize their approach to hypnosis. Erickson believed that the hypno-therapist must understand, evaluate, accept, and use the unique aspects of each patient. Erickson's often-extraordinary results occurred precisely because they activated and further developed what was already within the patient, instead of trying to impose from the outside an element that might be unacceptable for that individual's personality.

Medical hypnosis offers physicians the ability to make beneficial change even in difficult cases. Often this change occurs quickly, and sometimes it appears in unexpectedly positive ways. It is also very beneficial in developing deep understanding of underlying medical problems through closed-eye history-taking so that patients give their complete recollections instead of intellectualizations. There is a great future in the use of these techniques and much research is being done currently to understand and document in-depth the total picture of what hypnosis is and can do to facilitate treatment in the patient.