My 4 session virtual gastric band weight loss program not only offers a unique option to traditional dieting, but also a very interesting hypnotic application that is as enjoyable as it is effective.
Session one focuses on releasing the past and preparing for healthy change. Nearly all of my weight loss clients have been wrestling with their problem for years. Hypnotic release therapy techniques can be extremely powerful, instantly changing ones perspective from struggle to the anticipation of success.
This session also prepares clients for imaginary surgery, which is session two. They are guided through imaginary pre-op testing such as lab work and x-rays; they also meet with a nutritionist as well as their surgeon. At the conclusion of this session most clients feel liberated and refreshed, as though they finally have a choice.
Session two is the surgery session which includes all the sounds of the operating room. With the benefit of Bose noise cancelling headphones and a digital sound system, clients are guided into deep hypnosis and are then transported through an imaginary procedure making it much easier to lose weight.
The imaginative subconscious mind fills in the details with vivid imagery and sensations of the real thing. In fact, a small percentage of individuals actually experience a slight abdominal twinge lending a sense of realism to the process.
Session three mirrors what occurs after real-life gastric band surgery; clients get their gastric band tightened. This session offers another layer of
personal control which makes it easier for clients to succeed with their weight loss goals. Real-life gastric bands can easily be adjusted with a saline syringe, which is what clients are guided to imagine during hypnosis.
Session four supports enhanced confidence and eagerly seeking out healthy nutritional options. It helps clients become more aware of how they feel while eating so they can conclude mealtime when comfortable not full. It also suggests that mealtime be an uninterrupted endeavor; no texting, twitter, or television.
Most clients are pleasantly surprised by how they are easily able to establish healthy nutritional changes. After years of struggling with dieting, this program offers struggle-free, comfortable change. Clients feel as though they are trading-up to preferred options and activities that support what they want.
Sixty million Americans deal with this uncomfortable sensation at least once a month: heartburn. It’s not only painful, but can be life-altering, or even deadly if ignored. No wonder that heartburn and other gastrointestinal medications are among the most popular drugs on the market. But these “miracle drugs” are far from perfect; some patients report mixed results and long-term side effects.
For patients who don’t get relief from medication, their gastroenterologists are turning to psychologists for help. Hypnotherapy can be an effective treatment for heartburn and other stomach conditions. It’s a powerful alternative treatment, backed with plenty of scientific evidence, which is increasingly being offered at the nation’s leading medical centers.“
There’s a robust amount of literature behind hypnotherapy beginning in the 1980s,” said Laurie Keefer, Ph.D, director of psychosocial research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “We’ve really taken to calling it brain-gut therapy.”
Hypnosis, which exploits the relationship between the mind and digestive system, can also help with conditions like GERD and the inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Untreated GERD has been linked to esophageal cancer.
Amber Ponticelli, 35, started having digestive problems in 2007. Initially, she only felt dizzy and weak in the morning, but soon developed severe abdominal pain. Unable to eat or drink for months, she lost 20 pounds and was ultimately left bedridden.
After seeing multiple gastroenterologists at leading medical institutions, she was eventually diagnosed with a genetic condition that is associated with many GI symptoms.
“I thought I was dying. I had to quit my job and ended up moving to the city with my boyfriend just to be closer to the doctors I was seeing in the city,” Ponticelli told NBC News.
After traditional treatment like medications and lifestyle changes, a wary Ponticelli was referred to Keefer for a hypnotherapy session.
Hypnosis uses progressive relaxation techniques through suggestions of calming imagery and sensations. Patients are able to concentrate on improving their symptoms which often range from abdominal pain and constipation to diarrhea and bloating.
For the therapy to be effective it takes a series of eight or more visits and some homework is required of the patient, like listening to tapes at home. The treatment is covered by most insurance plans and cost for each visit ranges between $100 and $150.
Contrary to many popular portrayals on television and in fiction, a clinical hypnotherapist does not have mind-control over the hypnotized patient. The patient is usually aware of what is happening and their surroundings, both during and after a hypnosis session. A session can be offered in-person and remotely, via a service called telemedicine.
“Telemedicine is critical because not every place in the country has somebody qualified or trained to provide this treatment, so it allows us to have a much broader reach for these very common disorders,” Keefer told NBC News.
Studies show more than three quarters of patients experience at least a 50 percent reduction in symptoms. Many are able to stop medication, including popular acid reducing drugs.
Hypnosis optimizes the brain depth function, but it’s not a fix for everyone.
Approximately 15-20 percent of people can’t be hypnotized, said Dr. Olaf Palsson, psychologist and professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Fortunately, patients do not have to be highly hypnotizable to benefit from gut-directed hypnotherapy, so many could find relief.
According to gastroenterologist Dr. Rajeev Jain of the American Gastroenterological Association, gut-directed hypnosis therapy can treat functional disorders of the GI tract, such as irritable bowel syndrome, where there is often a large overlay of depression and anxiety disorders. He views hypnotherapy as one form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Lifestyle factors such as diet are also important and should be taken into account.
Today, Ponticelli, who lives outside of Chicago, is back to work as a Pilates instructor, and eating her favorite foods, an activity she had not enjoyed in years. She’s also eating for two. “I’m 17-and-a-half weeks along now and feel good,” said Ponticelli.
She still takes some medications, but adding hypnotherapy to her regimen has been life-changing. “I’m extremely grateful that I’m actually doing this and I don’t think I would have been able to do anything without this treatment. That’s the real truth of it.”
Instead of pills and needles, hypnosis may ease the pain of surgery — both during and after the procedure. According to a new study, women who received hypnosis before breast cancer surgery needed less anesthesia during the procedure, reported less pain afterward, needed less time in the operating room and had reduced costs.
“This helps women at a time when they could use help, and it has no side effects. It really only has side benefits,” said Guy Montgomery, lead author of the report and associate professor in the department of oncological sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
Montgomery hopes that the study, published online in the Aug. 28 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, will promote greater use of hypnosis in medical treatments. Side effects such as pain, nausea and fatigue — both during and after breast cancer surgery — are commonplace. Previous research has suggested that hypnosis, a simple and inexpensive procedure, can help ease these problems. One small clinical study indicated that hypnosis was also effective for breast cancer patients about to undergo surgery.
For the new study, 200 women set for breast cancer surgery were randomly assigned to receive either 15 minutes of hypnosis with a psychologist or assigned to a group that simply spoke with a psychologist.
During the hypnosis session, the patients received suggestions for relaxation and pleasant imagery as well as advice on how to reduce pain, nausea and fatigue. They also received instructions on how to use hypnosis on their own.
The researchers found that women in the hypnosis group required less anesthesia and sedatives than patients in the control group, and also reported less pain, nausea, fatigue, discomfort and emotional upset after the surgery.
Those who received hypnosis also spent almost 11 minutes less time in surgery and had their surgical costs reduced by about $773, mainly as a result of the shorter time.
Although people think that hypnosis strips a person of control, it actually does just the opposite, said Dr. David Spiegel, author of an accompanying editorial in the journal and Willson professor and associate chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.
“This is something that empowers patients,” Spiegel explained. “If you’re fighting, you think you’re protecting yourself, but, actually, you’re losing control, because you’re getting into a struggle with your own body. You can teach people to float instead of fighting. You get the body comfortable and think more clearly. The weird thing is it actually works. If thoughts can make the body worse, it follows that thoughts could actually make the body feel better.”
But will hypnosis catch on with health-care providers?
“We have this in-built skepticism of what goes on in the brain and the mind, and the idea is that the only real intervention is a physical one. Yet what supposedly distinguishes us is this huge brain on top of our bodies,” Spiegel said. “It seems more scientific and desirable to give drugs than it does to talk to people and have them reorganize the way they’re managing their bodies.”
There are other obstacles. Many doctors find it more expedient to write a prescription than learn to perform hypnosis.
Also, there’s no industry pushing the technique as there is with drugs, Spiegel said. On the positive side, little investment is needed to get a hypnosis program going, Montgomery said. “A psychologist or nurse could get training in a short period of time,” he said. “It’s not that involved.”
Dr. Darlene Miltenburg, assistant professor of surgery at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, called the new study “superb.” “Anybody who has an open mind would realize that this treatment works and is scientifically proven. It’s not black magic,” Miltenburg said. “It’s real, and we do use it here. It’s very time consuming, that’s part of the problem, taking a pill is much easier. But just like many things in life, we want a quick fix rather than something that takes longer.”
To learn more, visit the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
SOURCES: Guy Montgomery, Ph.D., associate professor of oncological sciences, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City; David Spiegel, M.D., Willson professor and associate chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, Calif.; Darlene Miltenburg, M.D., assistant professor of surgery, Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, and chief, Section of Breast Surgery, Scott & White, Temple; Aug. 28, 2007, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, online
Hypnotherapy is an incredibly adaptive tool which can be used in many ways and offers relief for many of life’s daily challenges. My typical work week involves a wide array of clients with unique needs, and this week is no different.
Here is a brief run down: a landlord is overwhelmed with the stress in dealing with tenants and vandalism; a hard working mom, who is a recovering alcoholic, wants to quit smoking; an IT professional wants help with tinnitus; a high school senior is having difficulty with stress/insomnia; a blue-collar dad wants to reduce stress and the criticism of his children; a healthcare professional wants to lose weight and control alcohol use; a psychologist struggles with his weight; a husband and wife, who drive a considerable distance, also create healthier eating patterns; and a woman with advanced Parkinson’s Syndrome struggles with anxiety and pain.
Through hypnotherapy, all of these clients learn how to establish emotional separation from their problems, and how to create liberating images and emotions supporting healthy change. For many, the disconnect from the difficult past can be palpable. The process of creating sustained relief involves listening to sessions daily at home. Repetition created problems, so we take the same approach with the solution. I recommend three months of brain-training, going to the mental gym.
A study identifies brain areas altered during hypnotic trance.By scanning the brains of subjects while they were hypnotized, researchers at the School of Medicine were able to see the neural changes associated with hypnosis. Your eyelids are getting heavy, your arms are going limp and you feel like you’re floating through space. The power of hypnosis to alter your mind and body like this is all thanks to changes in a few specific areas of the brain, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered.
The scientists scanned the brains of 57 people during guided hypnosis sessions similar to those that might be used clinically to treat anxiety, pain or trauma. Distinct sections of the brain have altered activity and connectivity while someone is hypnotized, they report in a study published online July 28 in Cerebral Cortex.
“Now that we know which brain regions are involved, we may be able to use this knowledge to alter someone’s capacity to be hypnotized or the effectiveness of hypnosis for problems like pain control,” said the study’s senior author, David Spiegel, MD, professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
A serious science
For some people, hypnosis is associated with loss of control or stage tricks. But doctors like Spiegel know it to be a serious science, revealing the brain’s ability to heal medical and psychiatric conditions.
“Hypnosis is the oldest Western form of psychotherapy, but it’s been tarred with the brush of dangling watches and purple capes,” said Spiegel, who holds the Jack, Samuel and Lulu Willson Professorship in Medicine. “In fact, it’s a very powerful means of changing the way we use our minds to control perception and our bodies.”
Despite a growing appreciation of the clinical potential of hypnosis, though, little is known about how it works at a physiological level. While researchers have previously scanned the brains of people undergoing hypnosis, those studies have been designed to pinpoint the effects of hypnosis on pain, vision and other forms of perception, and not the state of hypnosis itself. “There had not been any studies in which the goal was to simply ask what’s going on in the brain when you’re hypnotized,” said Spiegel.
Finding the most susceptible
To study hypnosis itself, researchers first had to find people who could or couldn’t be hypnotized. Only about 10 percent of the population is generally categorized as “highly hypnotizable,” while others are less able to enter the trancelike state of hypnosis.
Spiegel and his colleagues screened 545 healthy participants and found 36 people who consistently scored high on tests of hypnotizability, as well as 21 control subjects who scored on the extreme low end of the scales.
Then, they observed the brains of those 57 participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Each person was scanned under four different conditions — while resting while recalling a memory and during two different hypnosis sessions.
“It was important to have the people who aren’t able to be hypnotized as controls,” said Spiegel. “Otherwise, you might see things happening in the brains of those being hypnotized but you wouldn’t be sure whether it was associated with hypnosis or not.”
Brain activity and connectivity
Spiegel and his colleagues discovered three hallmarks of the brain under hypnosis. Each change was seen only in the highly hypnotizable group and only while they were undergoing hypnosis.
First, they saw a decrease in activity in an area called the dorsal anterior cingulate, part of the brain’s salience network. “In hypnosis, you’re so absorbed that you’re not worrying about anything else,” Spiegel explained.
Secondly, they saw an increase in connections between two other areas of the brain — the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula. He described this as a brain-body connection that helps the brain process and control what’s going on in the body.
Finally, Spiegel’s team also observed reduced connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the default mode network, which includes the medial prefrontal and the posterior cingulate cortex. This decrease in functional connectivity likely represents a disconnect between someone’s actions and their awareness of their actions, Spiegel said.
“When you’re really engaged in something, you don’t really think about doing it — you just do it,” he said. During hypnosis, this kind of disassociation between action and reflection allows the person to engage in activities either suggested by a clinician or self-suggested without devoting mental resources to being self-conscious about the activity.
Treating pain and anxiety without pills
In patients who can be easily hypnotized, hypnosis sessions have been shown to be effective in lessening chronic pain, the pain of childbirth and other medical procedures; treating smoking addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder; and easing anxiety or phobias. The new findings of how hypnosis affects the brain might pave the way toward developing treatments for the rest of the population — those who aren’t naturally as susceptible to hypnosis.
“We’re certainly interested in the idea that you can change people’s ability to be hypnotized by stimulating specific areas of the brain,” said Spiegel. A treatment that combines brain stimulation with hypnosis could improve the known analgesic effects of hypnosis and potentially replace addictive and side-effect-laden painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs, he said. More research, however, is needed before such a therapy could be implemented.
A Boston area Hypnotherapist, with 10 years of medical experience as an RN, Paul has been helping clients since 2001 to overcome everyday challenges. Read more
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