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Here’s a doco, a little old now, about an hospital in Belgium that uses hypnosis for anesthetic with surgery as a standard treatment. The number of operations is now well over 9,000.

• 4 out of 50 operations are done per day.
• When combined with traditional anesthetic 70% less drugs are used.
• less blood loss
• quicker recovery from the anesthetic
• and quicker healing from the operatin itself
• less shock to the system
• patient more empowered with there body mind and self.

Here’s a doco by a sceptical academic, a professor of sociology, exploring widely hypnosis, hypnotherapy and the some of the research. The hypnotherapy approaches shown are fairly old fashioned, lacking the more advanced interactive uses of psychology and counselling that we use to strengthen the hypnotic effects. These days we combine Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), Strategic Psychotherapy and mindfulness and reinforced by hypnosis that helps ensure long term chng embedded into your habits and lifestyle. The Functional Magnetic Resonnance Imaging (fMRI) research is interesting, about the different between imagining with and without hypnosis. There has been a lot more research since this was made.

History

Since the 1840s hypnosis has been used for anaesthesia. Around the same time, chemical anaesthetics became widespread. One particularly famous example was a Doctor Esdaille who did 358 operations in India reported, back then. His name has been passed down to us as the name for the state of hypnotic coma, used in surgery.

Our materialist traditions of thinking and science have been very against mind power. These attitudes are the product of the enlightenment of the 1700s and later resistance to the subjectivity of magical thinking in religion. As far back as the 1770s and 1780’s Benjamin Franklin was part of a French royal enquiry into Mesmerism (the early version of Western hypnosis) said it was “all in the imagination”. It was under a mistaken framework that trivialises the power of the mind to affect the body, under the right conditions.

James Braid in the 1840s-50s realised the first step in our modern approaches when he realised that self-hypnosis was possible and that he could do what Mesmerists did for himself. His insight was the beginning of the realisation it was a collaborative process, but still, focus on the internal focus on the subjective experience.

Milton Erickson introduced another level in adding the insight that it was an interpersonal process that emerged at the relationship between the hypnotist and client.

This video

This video is old now, and the numbers are up to 9000+ operations done at this hospital in Belgium.