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Mind over Medicine
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Mar 26, 2006 01:20pm |
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| Category | News |
| Media | Weekly News Magazine - TIME Magazine |
| News Date | Sunday, March 19, 2006 07:20:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Hypnosis as an alternative to sedation is making a comeback in the operating room. Here's how it works
By SORA SONG
Posted Sunday, Mar. 19, 2006
Shelley Thomas, 53, was wheeled into an anteroom at London's Middlesex Hospital in preparation for pelvic surgery. A patient going into that operation is usually given a mix of painkilling narcotics and nerve-quelling tranquilizers. But not Thomas. Instead she rested on a gurney, alert and calm, taking deep breaths at her hypnotherapist's instruction. Thomas counted aloud, "One hundred, deep sleep; 99, deeper sleep; 98 ..."
"By the time I got to 95, the words and numbers had all gone," says Thomas. "It's quite peculiar. They all go."
Minutes later, thoroughly hypnotized, Thomas was rolled into the operating room. There she underwent a 30-min. procedure with no anesthetics and no discernible pain. Her hypnotherapist stayed by her side throughout, monitoring her trance state and refocusing her mind when it drifted.
Thomas' story is not as extraordinary as you might think. Since the early 1990s, thousands of patients have opted for hypnosis--either as a substitute for or (more typically) as a complement to anesthesia--in a wide variety of surgical procedures, from repairing hernias to removing tumors. |
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