“At a hospital in Peterborough, Bernadine Coady, has been having routine knee surgery. But unlike most patients, she was not given any anaesthetic – instead, the 67-year-old claimed she used self-hypnosis to control the pain. She told surgeon Ahmed Shair of the private Orthopaedics and Spine Specialist Hospital in Cambridgeshire that she could feel only […]
It seems hypnosis has been nearly everywhere over the past few centuries: onstage with entertainers swinging fat, gold watches; on couches with reclining psychoanalysis patients; in movies, books, and even children’s cartoons. But the one gig hypnosis couldn’t get was the scientific laboratory. Until now. The long-controversial practice of inducing a trancelike state through suggestion […]
An article in the New York Times highlights recent brain studies which indicate that when people are acting under hypnotic suggestions, their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true. (New York Times – 22nd November 2005)
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) a team of neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh have seen hypnosis actually working on the brain. In a study to be published this year, a group of patients with the painful rheumatic condition fibromyalgia were hypnotised to imagine a dial controlling their pain levels and the brain activity […]