HMI Blog - Archive for 2013 August

A brave patient stayed wide awake as a surgeon sawed through his ankle bone, after using HYPNOSIS to numb the pain.

Trained hypnotherapist Alex Lenkei has gone under the knife without general anaesthetic an astonishing six times, saying he much prefers putting himself into a hypnotic trance to the traditional drugs used to bring about loss of consciousness.

And during his most recent operation to replace an ankle joint, he even asked consultant orthopaedic surgeon Dominic Neilsen: "How's it going?"

Giuliana Rancic's hoarding was a central theme on the latest episode of "Giuiana & Bill." It had become a huge issue of concern for virtually everyone in her life. Her husband, Bill, saw her stockpile of unused strollers at home in their garage. Their nanny saw Giuliana refuse to donate any clothes that baby Duke had grown out of. And her office at work was filled with cardboard boxes full of stuff.

So, Giuliana's friend Robbie organized a rather unique sort of pseudo-intervention. Rather than surround Giuliana with loved ones who could voice their concern and get her to face her problem, he brought in a hypnotist named Tom to "cure" her.

A new review of the scientific literature studying hypnosis, in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, by Oakley and Halligan, discusses the potential for hypnosis to provide insights into brain mechanisms involved in attention, motor control, pain perception, beliefs and volition and also to produce informative analogues of clinical conditions. This is a critical discussion as hypnosis is used as a psychological treatments and, recently, as an investigative tool in cognitive neuroscience.

An iconic vision of the menacing magician involves placing a hapless person from the audience into a hypnotic trance. Svengali. You are getting sleeeepy. A scam, right? Not so fast. According to to this new review, as well as our colleagues who study the brains of people who are prone to trancelike states, hypnosis is not necessarily hocus-pocus. The age-old practice profoundly alters neural circuits involved in perception and decision making, changing what people see, hear, feel, and believe to be true. Recent experiments led people who were hypnotized to “see” colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought they were gibberish.

The use of clinical hypnosis is being introduced at the university by new Visiting Professor Ursula James who is an internationally renowned expert in the field and the presenter of the Channel 5 show “Sex, Lies and Hypnosis.”

Professor James recently accepted the position of Visiting Professor in Clinical Hypnosis at RGU, the first appointment of its kind in the UK.

A university spokesman explained that Prof James, who is also a visiting teaching fellow at Oxford University Medical School, had been been approached by university authorities to take on her new role after delivering a workshop on self hypnosis for childbirth at the university’s Faculty of Health and Social Care in November last year.