How can hypnosis help me handle pain?
Hypnosis is a very powerful analgesic. Sometimes so powerful that a person can undergo major surgery with no chemical aneasthesia whatsoever, now that's a very small percentage of the population, maybe 2 to 5%, actually have the ability to have hypnosis be the anaesthesia for a dental or a medical procedure. However, the perception of pain is largely emotional, 15 to 25% of the perception of pain is actually the physical perception and the rest is emotional. And that's why everybody perceives pain differently. Some people are babies to pain, they can't take very much at all, they've learned that any pain is really really traumatic and other people can withstand enormous pain and not flinch, and so that part of it, that spectrum is the emotional part of pain. The mind is an amazing thing. Our brains are designed to really focus on one thing at a time. For instance, if I was to ask somebody in a course of conversation, "can you feel your left foot now", they'd go "oh yeah, there it is", but they couldn't feel it before. And so when we use hypnosis as a tool for pain management, what we do is redirect the brain's attention. For instance, suppose you had a pain in your leg, what we can have the brain redirect its attention to the hand, the left hand or maybe the left ear or and we can actually have the brain move the pain around and just literally make it go away. Now pain controls a very very sensitive topic because pain is a warning system. We feel pain because there is something wrong. So when someone calls me about pain management which I get quite a few calls about, I imagine the first thing we find out is what is the pain about. If it is medically related, then we have to get a referral from a physician. If someone comes in with a headache, and I help make the headache go away which is pretty easy and that headache was caused by a brain tumor, I've not done them any favors. And so while it is a very powerful tool for managing pain because we're managing that huge part of pain that is emotional, the cause of the pain is very very important. If it's a chronic issue and the person's physician knows that there's nothing life threatening then to use hypnosis to manage or eliminate that pain is absolutely appropriate. But if there's something going on that the patient doesn't know about and they come in with an ache or a pain, I'm gonna make sure in anybody that's reputable will make sure they get checked out by their doctor because the pain is there for a reason. But the mind is an amazing, amazing machine and it can literally control the perception of pain or discomfort and sometimes make it go away completely.
