What exactly is medical hypnosis?

Medical hypnosis is not show or stage hypnosis.

I often have to deal with prejudices. When people hear the word hypnosis, they think that I could snap my fingers and someone would collapse, fall asleep immediately, be unconscious, and then I could tell the person anything and they would cackle like a chicken and rob your bank. So I don't know how to do that. I never learned that in my various hypnosis training sessions. Show hypnosis, by the way, doesn't work with everyone either. That much is clear.

With medical hypnosis, I want my patients to be responsive. They are in a light trance, like in a pleasant daydream, maybe a little deeper, a little more relaxed. But when I ask them questions about what they see, hear, feel or experience, they should be able to answer me. Some tell me stories from early childhood, long-forgotten or repressed experiences that they may have found threatening, that have shaped them, and I guide the patients to put these into a new context. I can't do that with a woman who is sleeping or even snoring, it would be impractical.

What is medical hypnosis?

Medical hypnosis is the structured induction of a trance that can be repeated at any time and gives us access to the subconscious. When we are in our normal waking consciousness, is there a barrier, the so-called critical factor, between our waking consciousness and subconscious? We can make it permeable and then receive information from the subconscious or introduce suggestions or ideas there. This has absolutely nothing to do with show hypnosis. It has a lot to do with guiding people so that they can go through their own processes, awaken self-healing powers, change pain perception, increase their fertility. The range of applications for medical hypnosis is incredibly wide.

A bit of history

Yes, there are actually also hypnosis states that are very, very far away, where the person seems to be asleep. But it can be measured that the brain waves are not aimed at sleep. Dr James Esdaille the Scottish surgeon, best known in medical circles as the man who invented the stethoscope. Few people know that he was someone who performed over 200 surgical procedures under hypnosis without the patients needing painkillers. However, it must be said that at the time when this Scottish surgeon was working in India in the service of the British crown and the East India Trading Company, anaesthesia consisted of ether and chloroform, which were not particularly great compared to what we have in hospitals today. And that is why hypnosis is not used routinely today to take someone so deeply into hypnosis that they no longer feel pain and appear to be deeply asleep. Yes, it is feasible, very time-consuming, and does not work for everyone, so why should we do it? We have an excellent tool in modern anaesthesia.

The Aaron depth scale

There is the famous Aaron's depth scale from 1 to 6. 1 is a light daydream that we experience spontaneously from time to time. 6 is this very deep sleep-like state of hypnosis, where bodily functions work differently than is understandable with our normal daytime consciousness. In medical hypnosis, we work in the range of 3-4. The interesting thing is that if we give our body instructions in hypnosis, in this relaxed state, that it heals faster, that it perceives pain less, that we become more fertile, then we will experience this after some time.

My definition

I would describe medical hypnosis as follows: we use targeted suggestions to instruct the body to do what it is designed to do: its ability to repair cells, regulate hormones and regenerate organ systems and more. If we didn't have this ability, the human race would probably no longer be here on this beautiful planet, because modern medicine, as good as it is for acute illnesses, is not even 500 years old.

Medical hypnosis is not external manipulation, but rather the encouragement of inherent abilities and tendencies.