Hypnosis in Modern Western Medicine: History and Clinical Use

Introduction: Hypnosis and Holistic Medicine

Alternative medical therapy has become an increasingly discussed topic in the medical profession as more and more clinicians and agencies study and build collective works on issues surrounding preventative and holistic medical care. It has begun to be acknowledged across the field that traditional Western medicine may have been too focused on the technology and mechanisms that govern disease and not focused enough on the human needs of the patient.

Through this new emphasis on holistic care, doctors, nurses, hospitals, and their governing boards have begun to readdress longstanding issues: the melding of Eastern and Western traditional therapies, sound therapy, aromatherapy, spiritual therapy, and many others. At what some would call the crossroads of this holistic focus, one of the first developments has been the re-assimilation of proven methods of old into modern medicine.

One of the most proven, holistically useful, and repeatable of these methods is hypnosis. Hypnosis is a clinically proven and effective medical treatment for many human conditions, and the further use and exploration of it will benefit not only today's patients and clinicians but those who will be treated for centuries to come.

Through the new ideas of holistic medicine, challenges have emerged and science has been developed to answer many inherent questions about subjective experience. One clinician has observed: "Biofeedback is precise and potent. Hypnosis and imagery are poetic, equally powerful, and so far as I am concerned, even more versatile ways of mobilizing the mind to aid in healing." He is clearly not alone. Hypnosis has been an accepted treatment for a myriad of disorders and diseases for centuries.

The history of hypnosis is so ancient that little is known about its earliest possible uses. Yet through history and literature it is clear that hypnosis has been an integral part of spirituality, religion, and medicine in nearly every recorded culture. "Ancient Egyptians had the Temples of Sleep, and the Greeks their Shrines of Healing — both places where patients were given curative suggestion while in an induced sleep." As best we can tell, Siberian shamans and African witch doctors, medicine men, and healers around the world have successfully used hypnosis and imagery for thousands of years.

Prior to the fifteenth century, disease was often considered to be a punishment from God or gods. Healers of the time — shamans, priests, and so-called witch doctors — would induce an altered state of consciousness to help heal patients or to perform spiritual rituals, sometimes in the patient, sometimes in themselves, and sometimes in both. They employed many different techniques: chanting, drums, dancing, fire, and drugs were all incorporated in ritualistic ways. A common and important element was creating a "suggestion" that the patient's conscious and subconscious mind would accept, thus utilizing the patient's own power of belief. Believing that they were being healed put their own mental power to work in healing them.

From time immemorial, men and women in the most diverse cultures discovered how to use hypnotic and suggestive phenomena with immense pragmatic effectiveness for faith healing and for magico-religious and other purposes. But it was during the ultra-rational Age of Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century — as belief in fundamentalist religion was waning and the physical sciences were gaining prominence — that the physician-faith healer Franz Anton Mesmer devoted his life to developing a scientific understanding of the powerful therapeutic forces he had learned to control. Mesmer's theories have since been proved untenable, but the insights they contained initiated and provoked continuing scientific study (Shor 16).

Ancient and Historical Roots of Hypnosis

Before there was a clear understanding of disease as a biological process, it was thought that disease was associated with spiritual maladies — punishments from the gods or possession by demons. The modern mechanistic ideas of disease, adopted from years of rational thought being applied to both psychological and physical problems, led to the simpler idea that nearly all symptoms are biological processes occurring in the body. Through the natural progression of this rational focus, the body came to be seen as simply a biological machine, which often resulted in the dismissal of alternative treatments.

Each form of treatment must be researched and statistically proven to produce safe and effective outcomes before the Western medical industry can accept and sanction its use. Research associated with hypnosis has often been challenged by the simple fact that it is not always a clearly defined, physically observable state of being, and scientific skepticism is an underlying rule of all scientific exploration. As one commentator has noted, "The two inextricable dangers are the danger of not providing sufficient disciplined skepticism, and the danger of not providing sufficient positive catalyst." A standard research focus that can sometimes detract from alternative medicine research is the desire to find the mechanistic reasons for a treatment's effectiveness. Though this has been a potential danger since rational thought began, it is also the basis for proof and a required prescription for continued scientific discovery.

Yet in Western medical history there is a real and documented reliance on hypnosis as an effective tool of medical intervention. "Hypnosis is probably one of the oldest, and best medically established methods of beneficially altering mental perceptions and sub-conscious programming." While meditation is perhaps the oldest known method, it has not found as much favor within the Western medical establishment as hypnosis has. Hypnotism began being used by Western physicians for anesthesia during surgery long before chemical methods were invented. In fact, hypnosis is still being used that way today. "One of the greatest uses and needs for hypnosis was in the area of anesthesia. Because anesthesia as we know it didn't exist at all until the mid-nineteenth century."

Though there is a clear connection between religion, spirituality, and hypnosis — a connection that sometimes gives pause to modern rational scientists — hypnosis is also an effective treatment that demonstrates measurable physical success. It is clear that the early use of hypnosis as a medical treatment was in part due to the lack of alternatives. Without biological understandings of the human body and modern research, options were limited. Nonetheless, hypnosis is a time-tested and effective treatment, one born of necessity but no longer dictated by it. This can be seen clearly in medical research for treatments both psychological and physical, and most importantly in continued research that exposes Western medicine to alternatives to surgery and pharmaceuticals.

Stanford-trained physician Margaret Gedde, MD, PhD, expresses her personal beliefs about the value and necessity of alternative medicine and hypnosis specifically:

"I have seen the dramatic impact the mind can have on the body, making it important to understand and use in the practice of medicine. I have studied psychology, meditation, and hypnosis. I have found that while meditation has unique benefits that cannot be replaced by hypnotism, self-hypnosis can deliver many of the same benefits far more quickly and easily. Meditation can take years of practice to bring about positive changes. Hypnosis can bring about certain types of changes in months, or even the first session for some rare individuals."

Hypnosis in Early Western Medical Practice

Dr. Gedde is certainly not alone in her observation of alternative medicine as one of the most promising areas of future medical research and discovery.

One of the leading clinical advocates for the use of hypnotherapy as a viable — and sometimes singular — alternative to psychological and physical treatments is Erika Fromm, a noted psychologist who contributed extensively to the body of knowledge on psychotherapy. Fromm describes the general sense of effective hypnosis in a psychological treatment setting in this way:

"To give the reader a feel of what modern permissive hypnosis is, let us give you an example. In trance, as in dreams, people tend to think more in images than in language. Imagine a hanging lamp, which when near the ceiling sheds its light over the entire room, making everything visible. When entering hypnosis, it is as if the light is pulled down to just above the therapist and patient so that it shines more intensely on them both and the rest of the room is rather dark. The focus is entirely on the two of them and what transpires between them. The room and its contents have all but disappeared, and what is left is only the process between the two people, patient and therapist."

Fromm became a leading advocate for the use of hypnosis and, though controversy surrounded some of her assertions, her words remain a lasting legacy of the effectiveness and defense of hypnosis as a clinically proven and successful treatment option — one applicable either before or after other means have been tried.

An analysis of the historical scientific writings and research on hypnosis in the modern era shows that, though hypnosis treatment was often approached scientifically in attempts to understand its mechanistic validity, the results frequently raised more questions than they answered on that front. Yet one question that was consistently answered was that hypnosis was effective, and some of the most respected clinicians in psychology and medicine came to see it as a valid and useful tool for treating diseases and symptoms that could not easily or quickly be addressed by more traditional means.

In the initial clinical use of hypnosis, it was closely associated with psychoanalysis as a tool for extracting information from patients, in what was known as hypnoanalysis. Hypnoanalysis is the utilization of hypnosis in connection with the long-term treatment usually associated with psychoanalysis. It may use hypnosis as an uncovering technique, taking advantage of the hypnotic condition to supplement the more typical free-association technique of psychoanalysis, or it may use hypnosis to facilitate ego strengthening in cases of character problems or maladaptive human relationships.