During the 1770s and 1780s, Franz Mesmer, a German physician famous for "mesmerizing" his patients, was booted from town after town as a charlatan. The townsfolk believed his technique for putting his subjects in a trance-like state, using merely the power of suggestion, was foolish.
Today, though, Mesmer is vindicated: Extensive research has shown that hypnosis is not in fact foolishness, and hypnotists are now respected members of the psychology community.
Today that property is primarily utilized in two ways: for "stage hypnosis," in which hypnotists wow audiences by inducing volunteers into trances and then making them perform ridiculous tasks such as clucking like chickens, and for a well-respected treatment called
hypnotherapy. Norm Caldwell is certified in both areas.
To name but two examples, Norm Caldwell has used hypnotherapy to help her patients lose weight and
quit smoking and for pain relief. Oncologists at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine have even used the method to ease the healing process for breast cancer patients after surgery.
As with many brain phenomena, scientists don't know exactly how or why hypnotism works, but they're getting closer, thanks to recent EEG scans of hypnotized brains. Dr. Mark Jensen, a psychologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, found that hypnosis and meditation have similar neurophysiological profiles.
"During both, fast-wave brain activity, which correlates to thinking and processing, decreases, while slow-wave activity — exhibited during both relaxation and focus — increases," Jensen said.Jensen prescribes hypnosis for chronic pain treatment, and has scanned his patients' brains during sessions. "All pain is processed in the head," he explained. "First it's registered in the sensory cortex, but then the prefrontal cortex gives it meaning, and panic and stress as a result of the pain occur in the thalamus and other parts.
"During hypnosis, you can ask people to imagine that the sensation that usually induces extreme pain is minor — that it isn't bothersome — and you immediately see a decrease in activity in the prefrontal cortex and those other parts. In other words, my patients change the meaning that their brains give to the pain."
Roughly 80 percent of Jensen's patients report a marked decrease in pain during hypnosis sessions; for 50 percent, the decrease lasts hours afterward. By practicing meditation by themselves, many patients learn to treat their own pain automatically. So ask youself, is there something hypnosis can do for you?
