Hypnosis, Hypnosis

Spiegel, D. and Moore, R. (1997) "Imagery and hypnosis in the treatment of cancer patients" Oncology 11(8): pp. 1179-1195 Garrow, D. and Egede, L. E. (November 2006) "National patterns and correlates of complementary and alternative medicine use in adults with diabetes" Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 12(9): pp. 895-902 Mascot, C. (2004) "Hypnotherapy: A complementary therapy with broad applications" Diabetes Self Management 21(5): pp.15-18 Kwekkeboom, K.L. and Gretarsdottir, E. (2006) "Systematic review of relaxation interventions for pain" Journal of Nursing Scholarship 38(3): pp.269-277 For example, research done at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine studied two groups of patients facing surgery for breast cancer. The group that received hypnosis reported less pain, nausea, and anxiety post-surgery. There was a cost benefit as well: the average hypnosis patient reduced the cost of treatment by an average of $772.00. Montgomery GH, et al. " A Randomized Clinical Trial of a Brief Hypnosis Intervention to Control Side Effects in Breast Surgery Patients ." J Natl Cancer Inst. 2007 Sep 5;99(17):1280-1.

Dubin, William. "Compulsive Gaming" (2006) [30] "Cognitive Hypnotherapy: An Integrated Approach to the Treatment of Emotional Disorders." [31] Certified hypnotherapists who are not physicians or psychologists often do treatments for smoking cessation and weight loss. (Success rates vary: a meta-study researching hypnosis as a quit-smoking tool found it had a 20 to 30 percent success rate, similar to many other quit-smoking methods, O'Connor, Anahad.

Due to stage hypnotists' showmanship, many people believe that hypnosis is a form of mind control. However, the effects of stage hypnosis are probably due to a combination of relatively ordinary social psychological factors such as peer pressure, social compliance, participant selection, ordinary suggestibility, and some amount of physical manipulation, stagecraft, and trickery.

Wagstaff, Graham F. (1981) Hypnosis, Compliance and Belief St. Martin's Press, New York, ISBN 0312401574 Books written by stage hypnotists sometimes explicitly describe the use of deception in their acts, for example, Ormond McGill's New Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnosis describes an entire "fake hypnosis" act which depends upon the use of private whispers throughout.

He observed that the various degrees of hypnosis did not significantly differ physiologically from the waking state and hypnosis depended on insignificant changes of environmental stimuli. Pavlov also suggested that lower-brain-stem mechanisms were involved in hypnotic conditioning. Pavlov, I. P.: Experimental Psychology . New York, Philosophical Library, 1957.

Hypnosis would remove some control from the conscious mind, and the individual would respond with autonomic, reflexive behaviour. Weitzenhoffer describes hypnosis via this theory as "dissociation of awareness from the majority of sensory and even strictly neural events taking place." Weitzenhoffer, A.M.: Hypnotism - An Objective Study in Suggestibility . New York, Wiley, 1953.

A command can also be planted into the hypnotized mind and acted out accordingly long after the session of hypnosis, which works as follows: A person obeys the decision of reason in normal state, but when hypnotized, his/her reason is replaced by the hypnotist's command, and a person will be very uneasy if he/she can not do as having been decided or his/her belief is contradicted. Hypnotherapy is also based on this principle.

Increasing the signal-to-noise ratio enables messages to be more clearly received from a source. The hypnotist's object is to use techniques to reduce the interference and increase the receptability of specific messages (suggestions). Kroger, William S. (1977) Clinical and experimental hypnosis in medicine, dentistry, and psychology.

Source: Wikipedia > Hypnosis