June 08, 2005

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Controling your body

by Sue Dremann

When Mary Horngren hypnotizes people, she doesn't program them to cluck like a chicken.

A far cry from the popular notions created by stage hypnotists, Horngren's clients don't become the spiral-eyed zombies in cartoon caricatures.

She practices the serious discipline of clinical or medical hypnosis, a pain management tool recognized by the American Medical Association since 1958.

Medical hypnosis is gaining popularity as a method for combating a host of problems, from nicotine addiction to chronic pain, practitioners said. Last year, consumers spent more money on alternative or integrative medicine, including hypnosis, than on conventional therapies, Dr. Thomas Nagy, a staff psychologist at the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford said.

Studies at Stanford by Dr. David Spiegel, Lisa Butler, PhD, and others have moved the science of hypnosis forward and done much to legitimize it as a therapy. In a study published in the January issue of "Pediatrics" Spiegel and Butler concluded that children taught self-hypnosis experienced less distress during a difficult urinary tract procedure. It also took hypnotized children significantly less time to go through the procedure, Spiegel said.

Hypnosis is also gaining entrance into mainstream medicine as states allow medical professionals to go outside allopathic medicine and engage in alternative therapies, said Gil Boyne, founder of the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners, the primary non-profit organization responsible for the regulation of hypnotherapy training in the United States.

Nagy has used hypnosis on patients for 25 years. It is especially useful for managing chronic pain, migraine headaches, back pain, cancer pain and treatment side effects, and in pre- and post-surgery, he said.

Hypnosis isn't about mind control.

"You can't put ideas in someone's mind that go against their moral ethics - they would fight against it," Horngren said.

Rather, it's about giving people back some control over their bodies.

"Hypnosis is a state of focused attention and receptivity. It's a useful tool for people mastering abilities to relax. The heart rate goes down, the patient feels warmer, and the skin becomes drier - all signs of a relaxed state," Nagy said.

Derived from the Greek word, "hypnos," meaning "to sleep," hypnotism was used by some 19th century surgeons as an anesthetic. Before hypnosis, amputees received only alcohol to numb the pain while their limbs were removed.

A British surgeon working in India, James Esdaile, performed more than 300 amputations using hypnosis as anesthesia, and reduced the mortality rate from 50 percent to 10 percent, Boyne said. As the more efficiently anesthetizing chloroform and ether came into use, hypnosis fell by the wayside. "It was then considered humbug," David Spiegel, associate chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and medical director of the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine said.

Hypnosis patients aren't unconscious. Hypnotism brings patients to the same theta brain wave level as when one is dozing off to sleep, in a state between wakefulness and sleep - a light trance state, Horngren said. But unlike dozing, hypnosis heightens awareness in the same sense that one becomes absorbed in a book or film, to the exclusion of other stimuli.

People experience hypnosis quite naturally (see sidebar). Runners go into a hypnotic trance and musicians too; anyone who engages in an activity where they become highly focused and the rest of the world fades into the background has experienced a hypnotic trance, Nagy said.

Exactly how hypnosis works isn't understood. It's mechanisms "remain as much hidden as the concept of consciousness," Nagy said.

However, the effect of hypnosis is quantifiable, Spiegel said.

"Hypnosis is like a telephoto lens. ... Brain imaging shows clinical hypnosis can reduce the brain's response to pain and alter the perception of pain," he said.

In chronic pain conditions, the body's pain receptors keep firing. Hypnosis helps the patient separate the pain experience and focus attention elsewhere.

"Hypnosis uses all of the senses: sight, sound, taste, smell and touch," Horngren said.

Using "special place" imagery, such as a beach or walk in the forest, hypnotherapy replaces the focus on pain with responses to pleasure. Metaphor intervention, another potent methodology, replaces one idea of pain, visualized as an object, with something acceptable. One client's pain was like a great white shark gnawing on his shoulder, so he turned it into a goldfish, Horngren said.

Roughly two-thirds of people can be hypnotized, and probably half of the population could benefit from it, Spiegel said.

For cancer patients, it can be an effective tool in dealing with pain and anxiety. Jean Fournier, a medical hypnotherapist, teaches classes for cancer patients at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.

"Sometimes medicine reaches the end of its rope. Pain can be very persistent, or people run out of medicines that work or develop immunity to the medication. Hypnosis is really useful where stress is an element."

Nearly half of Fournier's clients use hypnosis for pre- and post-surgical applications. People give a message to their body to control bleeding, heal quickly and come out of anesthesia alert and calm, she said.
E-mail Staff Writer Sue Dremann at sdremann@paweekly.com.

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