If the suggestion is one that chronic pain will subside, or that anxiety will gradually melt away, hypnosis becomes a valuable therapeutic tool. And when told they won't recognise themselves in a mirror, they'll see a vaguely familiar stranger mimicking their movements through a pane of glass. When they hear their interlaced fingers will be impossible to separate, it will be like they are held together with glue. When a hypnotisable person is told their arm will start moving about as if all by itself, it will. Entering a hypnotic state, focusing intently and listening to a suggestion is, for many people, enough to make that suggestion a reality. What makes it so interesting is that it often does. Over the next 50 years, he would go on to found the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University and, by his reckoning, hypnotise more than 7,000 patients.Īt first glance, hypnosis seems like one of those psychological phenomena that just shouldn't work. The girl grew up to train as a respiratory therapist, while Spiegel embarked on a career in clinical hypnosis. It was a formative encounter for doctor and patient. Within five minutes, the patient's wheezing had stopped and she was lying back in her bed, breathing comfortably. "I said, 'Each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier.'" "So I came up with something," Spiegel tells me, as he recalls the case. They hadn't got to asthma in his hypnosis class yet. But as the girl sat in bed, calm and focused, Spiegel wondered what suggestion he should make. Once the girl had entered the trance-like state characteristic of hypnosis, Spiegel was ready to make a suggestion – the "active ingredient" of hypnotic treatment, typically a carefully worded statement that will produce an involuntary response. She nodded, and so Spiegel hypnotised his first patient. "Do you want to learn a breathing exercise?" he asked her. After two shots, the girl's attack was not subsiding. The young asthma patient's medical team had already tried to dilate her airways with injections of adrenaline. As part of his training, he was also taking a class in clinical hypnosis. Spiegel was a medical student on a paediatric rotation at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts, US, in 1970. It was the third time the girl had been hospitalised for asthma in as many months. He could hear her wheezing from halfway down the hall.Įntering the patient's room, he saw a 16-year-old girl with red hair sitting bolt upright in bed, knuckles white, in the midst of an asthma attack. When David Spiegel was told his next patient was waiting for him, he didn't need to ask the room number.
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