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By ELIZABETH BROMSTEIN There's pretty conclusive evidence that hypnosis is effective in pain management. "Hypnosis is a form of highly focused attention. It can help with pain control, dieting, treatment of phobias.
"It's good for habit problems, especially smoking. It's used to control certain psychosomatic problems like seizures and irritable bowel syndrome.
How does hypnosis work?
Are you sitting down? You have sensations from your bottom touching the chair that you weren't aware of until I brought them to your attention. We focus on certain things and put others out of consciousness.
Being in hypnosis is a more intense way of doing that."
DAVID SPIEGEL , associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Stanford University, co-author Trance And Treatment
“It's as if the volume knobs on the experience of pain have been turned down. We're equipped with immense power to regulate thoughts and emotions.
This power can be used for better or worse: turning up the pain of a recent breakup, for instance, by focusing on thoughts of loss, or turning it down by focusing on a newfound freedom. The trick is to harness this power for well-being.
Nature has clearly equipped our brains with the means to regulate the perception and meaning of worldly events. Luckily, this power is not only revealed through hypnosis but can be cultivated consciously by all of us."
ADAM ANDERSON ,
Canada Research Chair, department of psychology, U of T
"A person has to want to change, because hypnosis doesn't take over anybody's mind.
I do believe in past life regression as a tool for change and healing. Whether you believe in it or not, past life regression can work as a metaphor to help you get to what you need to know.
How you take your journey and where you take it to - whether it be to age two in your current life or to your mother's womb or to another country and another time - doesn't matter. You can only be hypnotized if you allow it."
GEORGINA CANNON , Ontario Hypnosis Centre, Toronto
"We want to slow down the conscious mind; the subconscious is much more sensitive to suggestion.
There is regression therapy: age regression, past life therapy, life between lives, which is not your past life, not your current life but what happens when you're not in a physical body. For regression, we want to get even deeper into the unconscious mind and locate the source of the past trauma.
We want to bring the core issues up and release and clear the energy. It doesn't matter whether you believe in past lives, because the mind is still going to bring up information that will help you heal."
HELEN ZADOR , hypnotherapist, Toronto
"There is really nothing that hypnosis cannot undo.
Every state of human subjective reality has a structure. If you can undo the structure, you can bring about profound change.
For example, it is intuitive to our language that we speak of cancer as a state. If you talk like this, at an intuitive level you are indexing that the cancer is a form of subjective reality that has a structure.
If you can change the structure, you will be able to change the cancer."
DENNIS CHONG , hypnotherapist, psychotherapist, Toronto
"There is no broad consensus about how hypnosis works neurally.
The most consistent neural finding is that hypnosis affects the functioning of the anterior cingulate, a frontal/limbic area.
With people who have high hypnotic ability, it is possible to alter the functioning of the anterior cingulate such that the unpleasantness of pain disappears.
There's evidence that hypnosis may affect functioning in other parts of the brain as well. If a hypnotized person looks at a picture in shades of grey but is told it's in color, the color perception areas of the brain become active."
ERIK WOODY , professor, clinical psychology, University of Waterloo
