The Transparent Hypnotist

Hypnosis has so many applications within modern medicine that it I often think most hospitals should have a hypnotist or two on staff.   The effectiveness of hypnosis for managing pain has been well documented, but there is a lot more than just that going on in an average hospital that could keep a staff hypnotist busy.

Case in point:  the well-known Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI, test.  It’s a pretty intimidating procedure.  You lie down on a sliding table, get inserted into a narrow tunnel inside a huge round machine, which then begins to make loud chunking noises all around you — while you’ve been admonished to remain absolutely still.  Some patients are so unnerved by the noises, or by the close confines of the tube, that they panic and technicians have to pause or redo parts of the test.  In extreme cases the patient has to be sedated to keep them calm long enough to take the images.

A few weeks ago a dear friend of mine was scheduled to undergo an MRI exam of her pelvic region.  She was fairly experienced at being hypnotized and wondered whether I could give her some suggestions that would help her to remain still and calm during what she knew from prior experience would be a relatively unpleasant process.  Of course, I told her.

We arranged a Skype voice chat for the evening before the test.  I took my friend into hypnosis and we walked through the procedure in her mind:  arriving at the hospital, changing into the usual little gown, getting on the table, being slid into the machine, hearing the noise, etc.  Then I used the noise, which she could remember from prior MRI sessions, and made that noise a trigger for her body to become totally relaxed and still.

My friend got through the exam quickly and easily.  The loud clunking of the machine, which had been unnerving and startling to her before, became a welcome trigger into a state that made the imaging time pass very quickly for her (hooray, hypnotic time distortion!).  I won’t claim that hypnosis made the MRI experience pleasant, but she did feel pretty good during most of it.  And the test results were happy ones, so everything worked out well.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Client Stories, Guest Blogger, Hypnosis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.