As lawmakers debate on bills that could impact the opioid crisis in Tennessee, people have been looking for alternative treatments to help with chronic pain and, in many cases, addiction.
Steve Olson has been taking individual and group clinical hypnosis sessions at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine on West End in Nashville.
Olson has been dealing with neuropathy for the last five years. He described the extreme pain to his thighs as a baseball bat hitting him.
“I cannot even sleep with a bed sheet on my legs because the weight of a bed sheet would be extremely painful, so I would sleep on top of the bed,” Olson told NewsChannel 5. He was active and had a job, but the pain was so unbearable that Olson had to quit and rely on heavy amounts of drugs, including muscle relaxers.
He showed us nearly three pages of medications he had to take. At least one doctor wanted to increase his dosage. “Percocet was seven to eight times a day, and sometimes ten times a day. Morphine was three to four a day. I would basically sit in the chair and stare at the television and sit there and cry for hours,” recalled Olson.
Tennessee is one of the states with the highest number of opioid prescriptions per person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention. Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas also join the list.
In January, Governor Bill Haslam proposed an aggressive and comprehensive plan to end the opioid epidemic in the state with three major components, including the legislature addressing prevention by limiting the supply and the dosage of opioid prescriptions.
The 66-year-old Franklin resident even went through at least a dozen doctors and different hospitals for the pain before landing at OCIM.
Dr. Lindsey McKernan helped guide him to a better place and move away from the opioids through hypnosis. “It’s a treatment that focuses between a patient and a provider, and it can be done in a group and an individual setting. It’s about learning a way to relax very deeply where you’re guided into that by a provider,” said McKernan.
She said hypnosis can help reduce the activity of signals firing back and forth between the brain and body when the person is experiencing pain. “It might not be the pain goes completely away, but it could be that your daily pain changes to seven out of ten to five out of ten. That could make the difference between getting out of bed for the day,” added McKernan.
McKernan emphasized that hypnosis is not what is perceived in Hollywood. It is a method that allows her to relax the brain through “suggestions” and make changes in emotions, mood, thoughts, or how you feel in certain parts of your body. “I think it’s helping me learn to cope with the pain and learn how to live life again,” said Olson.
McKernan started the clinic hypnosis program 18 months ago with a four-hour a week clinic before transitioning to group sessions. The center went from treating four patients to 30 plus every week with a bigger team.
It’s part of research determining the effects of the group program to help with pain and quality of life aspects and how that compares to individual hypnosis. The research will last for another year.
Hypnosis services are covered by most insurances, and if they are done by a trainee under supervision, it is a free service. Most of the clinical services at OCIM are insurance-based, including mindfulness classes. The center’s movement classes (yoga, tai chi), acupuncture, and massage are fee-for-service.
By: Matthew Torres
Hypnosis has become a common medical tool, used to reduce pain, help people stop smoking and cure them of phobias. But scientists have long argued about whether the hypnotic “trance” is a separate neurophysiological state or simply a product of a hypnotized person’s expectations.
A study published on Thursday by Stanford researchers offers some evidence for the first explanation, finding that some parts of the brain function differently under hypnosis than during normal consciousness.
The study was conducted with functional magnetic resonance imaging, a scanning method that measures blood flow in the brain. It found changes in activity in brain areas that are thought to be involved in focused attention, the monitoring and control of the body’s functioning, and the awareness and evaluation of a person’s internal and external environments.
“I think we have pretty definitive evidence here that the brain is working differently when a person is in hypnosis,” said Dr. David Spiegel, a
professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford who has studied the effectiveness of hypnosis. Functional imaging is a blunt instrument and the findings can be difficult to interpret, especially when a study is looking at activity levels in many brain areas.
Still, Dr. Spiegel said, the findings might help explain the intense absorption, lack of self-consciousness and suggestibility that characterize the hypnotic state.
He said one particularly intriguing finding was that hypnotized subjects showed decreased interaction between a region deep in the brain that is active in self-reflection and daydreaming and areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in planning and executing tasks.
That decreased interaction, Dr. Spiegel said, suggested an explanation for the lack of self-consciousness shown by hypnotized subjects. “That’s why the stage hypnotist can get a football coach to dance like a ballerina without feeling self-conscious about what he’s doing,” Dr. Spiegel said. He added that it might also explain, at least in part, why hypnosis is an effective tool in psychotherapy for getting people to look at a problem in a new way.
The researchers screened more than 500 potential subjects for susceptibility to hypnosis and then compared brain activity in 36 who scored very highly on tests measuring susceptibility to hypnosis and 21 who had very low scores on those tests.
Brain activity during hypnosis was also compared with activity during resting periods and during a memory task, for both high and low susceptibility groups.
In the hypnosis task, the subjects were guided through two guided procedures for hypnotic inductions: in one, they were instructed to imagine a time when they felt happiness; in the other, they were told to remember or imagine a vacation.
All the subjects were asked in the study to rate how deeply hypnotized they felt during the inductions. Although some researchers continue to argue that hypnosis is a state produced by people’s expectations, not by biology, Dr. Spiegel said, “At some point, I just think it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling word game. I see hypnosis as a kind of app you haven’t used on your cellphone,” he said. “It’s got all kinds of capacity that people are just figuring out how to use, but if you haven’t used it the phone doesn’t do that.”
By: Erica Goode
Some argue that hypnosis is just a trick. Others, however, see it as bordering on the paranormal – mysteriously transforming people into mindless robots. Now our recent review of a number of research studies on the topic reveals it is actually neither. Hypnosis may just be an aspect of normal human behavior.
Hypnosis refers to a set of procedures involving an induction – which could be fixating on an object, relaxing or actively imagining something – followed by one or more suggestions, such as “You will be completely unable to feel your left arm”.
The purpose of the induction is to induce a mental state in which participants are focused on instructions from the experimenter or therapist, and are not distracted by everyday concerns. One reason why hypnosis is of interest to scientists is that participants often report that their responses feel automatic or outside their control.
Most inductions produce equivalent effects. But inductions aren’t actually that important. Surprisingly, the success of hypnosis doesn’t rely on special abilities of the hypnotist either – although building rapport with them will certainly be valuable in a therapeutic context.
Rather, the main driver for successful hypnosis is one’s level of “hypnotic suggestibility”. This is a term which describes how responsive we are to suggestions. We know that hypnotic suggestibility doesn’t change over time and is heritable. Scientists have even found that people with certain gene variants are more suggestible.
Most people are moderately responsive to hypnosis. This means they can have vivid changes in behavior and experience in response 
to hypnotic suggestions. By contrast, a small percentage (around 10-15%) of people are mostly non-responsive. But most research on hypnosis is focused on another small group (10-15%) who are highly responsive.
In this group, suggestions can be used to disrupt pain, or to produce hallucinations and amnesia. Considerable evidence from brain imaging reveals that these individuals are not just faking or imagining these responses.
Indeed, the brain acts differently when people respond to hypnotic suggestions than when they imagine or voluntarily produce the same responses. Preliminary research has shown that highly suggestible individuals may have unusual functioning and connectivity in the prefrontal cortex.
This is a brain region that plays a critical role in a range of psychological functions including planning and the monitoring of one’s mental states. There is also some evidence that highly suggestible individuals perform more poorly on cognitive tasks known to depend on the prefrontal cortex, such as working memory.
However, these results are complicated by the possibility that there might be different sub types of highly suggestible individuals. These neurocognitive differences may lend insights into how highly suggestible individuals respond to suggestions: they may be more responsive because they’re less aware of the intentions underlying their responses.
For example, when given a suggestion to not experience pain, they may suppress the pain but not be aware of their intention to do so. This may also explain why they often report that their experience occurred outside their control. Neuroimaging studies have not as yet verified this hypothesis but hypnosis does seem to involve changes in brain regions involved in monitoring of mental states, self-awareness and related functions.
Although the effects of hypnosis may seem unbelievable, it’s now well accepted that beliefs and expectations can dramatically impact human perception. It’s actually quite similar to the placebo response, in which an ineffective drug or therapeutic treatment is beneficial purely because we believe it will work. In this light, perhaps hypnosis isn’t so bizarre after all. Seemingly sensational responses to hypnosis may just be striking instances of the powers of suggestion and beliefs to shape our perception and behavior. What we think will happen morphs seamlessly into what we ultimately experience.
Hypnosis requires the consent of the participant or patient. You cannot be hypnotized against your will and, despite popular misconceptions, there is no evidence that hypnosis could be used to make you commit immoral acts against your will.
Hypnosis as medical treatment
Meta-analyses, studies that integrate data from many studies on a specific topic, have shown that hypnosis works quite well when it comes to treating certain conditions. These include irritable bowel syndrome and chronic pain. But for other conditions, however, such as smoking, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder, the evidence is less clear cut – often because there is a lack of reliable research.
But although hypnosis can be valuable for certain conditions and symptoms, it’s not a panacea. Anyone considering seeking hypnotherapy
should do so only in consultation with a trained professional. Unfortunately, in some countries, including the UK, anyone can legally present themselves as a hypnotherapist and start treating clients. However, anyone using hypnosis in a clinical or therapeutic context needs to have conventional training in a relevant discipline, such as clinical psychology, medicine, or dentistry to ensure that they are sufficiently expert in that specific area.
We believe that hypnosis probably arises through a complex interaction of neurophysiological and psychological factors – some described here and others unknown. It also seems that these vary across individuals.
But as researchers gradually learn more, it has become clear that this captivating phenomenon has the potential to reveal unique insights into how the human mind works. This includes fundamental aspects of human nature, such as how our beliefs affect our perception of the world and how we come to experience control over our actions.
By: Devin Terhune and Steven Jay Lynn
