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Spiegel recommends two professional hypnosis societies for referrals:
Hypnosis, a therapy that has been around since the 1800s, is now being used to help relieve pain and anxiety during certain surgical procedures, including brain surgery. This ScienCentral News video has more.
Pain Control
Hypnosis has been misunderstood as a nightclub stunt, a loss of control and a type of sleep, but it's been a therapeutic tool for centuries. Dr. David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine describes hypnosis as a "focused state of attention."
"Being hypnotized is something like looking through a telephoto lens," Spiegel explains. "What you see you see with great detail, but you're less aware of the surroundings, of the context in which you're experiencing it. So it's like getting so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching the movie, you enter the imagined world. That's what a hypnotic state is like. You wake up and pay attention in a highly focused way. So the parts of the brain that are involved in attention, the frontal cortex, for example, are turned on when you're hypnotized."
Spiegel uses hypnosis—specifically, he teaches self-hypnosis—to help people control their pain and anxiety during certain surgical procedures. He has treated hundreds of patients undergoing medical and surgical procedures over decades, and has conducted clinical trials of hypnosis in the operating room, reporting dramatic results. "In the last five years we've begun doing randomized trials for acute surgical and medical pain," he says, "and we've got a number a studies now that show that hypnosis reduces pain, reduces anxiety, reduces the amount of medication people need, reduces complications, and makes the procedures shorter, 17 to 20 minutes per procedure."
Dr. Spiegel describes hypnosis as a focused state of attention.
The procedures are ones that don't require general anesthesia, but do require patients to stay alert—such as invasive radiological procedures, and deep brain stimulation for patients with Parkinson's disease, in which surgeons implant electrodes in the brain to stimulate areas that control movement. Spiegel, who's work was recently featured in Discover Magazine, has used hypnosis to help patients undergo these procedures, as well as with his wife in the delivery room when his own children were born. He had one Parkinson's patient "who had actually had so much discomfort that he stopped the previous [deep brain stimulation] procedure three hours into it—they had to close up and discontinue the surgery. I had him picture that he was on the beach in Hawaii helping his daughters with their math lessons, and he went on figuring out their math for them, and he got through the procedure fine."
Dr. Michael Kaplitt, a neurosurgeon at Weill-Cornell Medical Center in New York who performs deep brain stimulation, says he's open to the idea, but would like to see it studied more. "I wouldn't have a problem with it," he says. "My only concern would be, is that going to affect the rest of their brain activity to the point where it would make the operation more difficult? Certainly if it will help patients to get themselves through this kind of thing, then that's great."
While Spiegel says not all people can be hypnotized (he has a test to determine this, called the Hypnotic Induction Profile), he believes that "any surgical or medical procedure that involves pain and anxiety and that doesn't have general anesthesia is something where we could help patients get through it more comfortably. I think it ought to be part of standard training in nursing and medicine so that people know how to help patients get through these procedures better."
And to those who think of being hypnotized as losing control, Spiegel says, "hypnosis is a way of enhancing people's own control over their bodies and their consciousness. It's not a matter of me putting the whammy on someone and saying, 'Go do this.' It's a matter of teaching them how to restructure their approach to their problem and manage it better."
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