Childish reasoning thinks like the rooster Chanticleer. He noted that the sun rose after he crowed, and concluded that it rose because he crowed.
* * *
* * *
68. Anamnesis
* * *
Anamnesis is the correct word for what we call history. Mnesis is memory; amnesia is no (verbal or explicit) memory. Anamnesis is what the patient did not forget or repress, so it’s all the patient can give us from explicit memory. The verbal “history” contains Freudian slips, non-responsive answers to questions, sighs, volunteered negatives, and gratuitous or qualifying clauses that come from implicit memory, and guide us to the subconscious mind set. What is repressed is seminal in psychosomatic medicine, so we must listen in literal.
We learned from the polygraph (lie detector) that a sigh negates what was just said. A volunteered negative expresses what the patient is guarding against, so a volunteered “It’s not caused by fear” means that it is caused by fear. When I ask a pre-op patient “How do you feel about this operation?” and get “OK (pause), I guess,” the qualifying “I guess” tells me he subconsciously lied, saying “OK,” then felt guilty for lying and added “I guess” to clear his conscience. I need to find out what reservations he has about the procedure before I operate.
* * *
* * *
69. Self-analysis using pendulum
or ideomotor signals
* * *
Nobody taught me that I could analyze my own symptoms by using self-hypnosis and setting up ideomotor finger signals or by using a Chevreul pendulum in the waking state. It works well for me to analyze my own dreams at the time I become aware of the dream. What is the affect – fear, anger, love, guilt, sadness, etc.? What happened yesterday to trigger it? Who is in it – me, spouse, parent, sibling, God, enemy, etc.? Does it refer back to something in my past? If so, before 30, or 20, or 10, or 5, etc.? Would it be all right to bring it up to a conscious level? And “Voila!” there it is. All of these need to be “yes” or “no” questions.
Triggers for dreams are interesting. I recall an awful nightmare I had, in which there were six bodies laid out and I stabbed each of them in the heart. I woke up horrified, then used the above technique to interpret the dream. It turned out that in the course of my surgical career I had had six cardiac arrests, with varying outcomes, but always of deep concern to me at the time. I learned whatever lesson there was to learn from each, and did not think about them consciously. I wondered what had triggered this dream, which occurred while I was on my vacation. What came up was that I was at a friend’s home and had stumbled upon a book of stories I had enjoyed as a child. The author was Bret Harte. Words activate old memories, functioning like search words to Google the subconscious.
* * *
* * *
70. Self-regression
* * *
Part of self-analysis includes age regression. I was able to validate a self-regression to the fourteenth day of my life from the microfilm records of the hospital where I was born. I reported it in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (Ewin 1994).
* * *
* * *
71. The symptom is a solution
* * *
One of Milton Erickson’s most
profound observations!
We all know that halitosis is better
than no breath at all.
In the movie Forrest Gump, the little crippled boy was being hounded by the bullies and felt terrified and helpless, with no solution. Jenny shouted “Run, Forrest, run.” He did, and escaped, and from then on he had a “solution” that was really a disabling symptom – whenever he was stressed, he would run – finally all the way across the United States.
* * *
* * *
72. Target organ
* * *
A chain is as weak as its weakest link, and a body under stress gets symptoms first in its target organ (weakest link).
We experience our emotions in our bodies. Over and over again I have done regressions to the first time the problem occurred, and found that the target organ was selected when a highly emotional incident occurred, associated with a trauma or illness involving that organ. Even when the careful medical evaluation is normal, recurring headaches may occur under stress in a patient whose introduction to life was the painful head squeezing of a forceps delivery, or a recurring cough in a survivor of childhood whooping cough, or diarrhea in a survivor of typhoid fever.
* * *
* * *
73. Trance logic
* * *
With ordinary (left brain) logic turned off, the hypnotized mind is open to uncritically accepting clearly irrational and paradoxical situations or statements.
In New Orleans during the big drive against illiteracy, the advertising companies got some of the federal money and we had large billboards saying “Learn to Read.” Louisiana advertises itself as a “Dream State.”
* * *
* * *
74. Pygmy in the land of giants
* * *
This analogy was used by William J. Bryan, Jr., MD to describe the dilemma of an abused child.
A pygmy in the land of giants has to believe that the giants know where they’re stepping or go crazy, being constantly alert to protect himself. Some abused children do go crazy but those who don’t tend to grow up subconsciously believing “there must be something wrong with me” or the giants (who know what they’re doing) wouldn’t have treated me that way.
It’s imagined guilt and in trance it can be treated by calling on reality testing to recognize that the adults were sick, not the child, and it has to be left behind. When we change an idea, we change an illness.
* * *
* * *
75. Migraines and hypoglycemia
* * *
Migraine headaches frequently respond poorly to hypnotic suggestions for pain relief. I have found that many of my migraineurs also have functional hypoglycemia, which Hans Selye (1946) showed is the end result of chronic stress (Thing 86). A five hour glucose tolerance test will confirm it. Their dietary enemies are refined sugar, refined flour, alcohol, and caffeine.
I get good relief by putting these patients on a six feeding, low sugar, low refined carbohydrate, no alcohol, and no caffeine diet combined with hypnoanalytic sessions for general stress relief.
* * *
* * *
76. Shingles and vitamin B
* * *
Shingles is an infection of the ramus of a nerve by the virus (herpes simplex) that causes chickenpox, resulting in an inflammation of the sensory nerve and dermatitis in the skin area served by it. In healthy young people it heals in four to six weeks, but in the elderly it frequently fails to heal and becomes a chronic painful post-herpetic neuralgia.
Since vitamin B complex deficiency causes a polyneuritis (beriberi), it seems reasonable to me that we must make sure there is no B deficiency when trying to heal a neuritis. Combining hypnotic suggestions for pain relief with high doses of B complex and B12 injections, most of my patients have recovered in less than four weeks without getting a post-herpetic neuralgia. I am unable to find any controlled studies of B complex in the literature on shingles, and recognize that this is using “armchair” logic. Nonetheless, it works for post-herpetic neuralgia, and I don’t know if it’s the hypnosis or the vitamins or the combination that does it.
* * *
* * *
77. Warts and warm, cool, or tingle
* * *
Warts are a viral infection and when treated with cautery, freezing, surgery, topical salicylates, interferon injections, and so on, about 30 percent keep recurring. Traditional treatment is OK, but when warts are on the bottom of the foot, under the nails, on the genitalia, or on the vocal cords, hypnosis is the treatment of choice. When cured with hypnosis they almost never recur, presumably because the patient’s own immune system has effected the cure. With children, direct suggestion of cure usually suffices. With post-
pubertal teens and adults, I frequently have to use ideomotor signals and go through Cheek’s seven common causes of symptoms (Thing 7) to remove any emotional inhibition to healing. Surprisingly, about half of these patients have sexual issues that inhibit healing, and once dealt with they heal easily.
I used to suggest that the area of skin around the wart would get warm, with more blood supply bringing in antibodies and so on, but often that didn’t work. When it didn’t, the patient would give an ideomotor signal that cold would have been easier. I now ask the patient’s subconscious to choose from four choices – make it warm, cool, tingle, or a way of your own. When the patient gives his/her ideomotor choice in trance, I touch the wart (obviously not with venereal warts) for a tactile feedback, and have the patient daydream the change. When I get an ideomotor signal that the change has occurred, I say “Keep it that way until it’s healed (Thing 54). Your body knows how to heal, and you can turn this over to your body and give it no more conscious attention.”
I avoid adding self-hypnosis because all of the experimental studies that have included it have had miserable statistical results. In their controlled, prospective study that included self-hypnosis, Felt et al. (1998) got only a 5 percent cure rate, and I wrote an editorial on my opinion of why the results did not exceed even placebo response (Ewin 1998). I get an 80 percent cure rate doing analysis and specifically avoiding self-hypnosis (Ewin 1992).
* * *
* * *
78. Get treated yourself
* * *
One of the best things that happened to me was to be successfully treated with hypnosis early in my study of the subject. It convinced me of the validity of this form of treatment and gave me a strong sense of conviction that my patients could solve their problems too, if I gave them choices.
Emile Coué said “Conviction is as necessary to the suggester as the subject. It is this conviction, this faith, which enables him to obtain results when all other means have failed (emphasis mine).”
Luke Skywalker: “I don’t believe it.”
Yoda: “That’s why you fail.”
The Empire Strikes Back
Dr. A. A. Mason, who reported the only known cure of a case of the “incurable” congenital ichthyosis of Brocq (1952), told us that he mistakenly thought the patient was covered with warts and confidently gave the suggestions to heal. Later, when biopsies showed that it was “incurable,” he was unable to heal any of eight subsequent patients who had the same disorder (Mason 2007).
Scripture says “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? For ye shall speak into the air” (1 Corinthians 14:8–9).
* * *
* * *
79. “The best doctors are Dr. Diet,
Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman”
– Jonathan Swift
* * *
This threesome is worth remembering.
Each is noted in the Bible.
Diets in our time are often deficient. Vitamin C is our stress vitamin, and only guinea pigs, anthropoid apes, and humans have an inborn error of metabolism and don’t make their own. Most of my hypnosis patients are in treatment because of various stresses, and the 60 mg/day (one glass of orange juice) RDA recommended daily allowance is not optimal; 60 mg is only enough to prevent scurvy, a fatal disease. I advise a multivitamin supplement plus 1,000 mg of vitamin C daily for my patients, and believe it helps, particularly because most of them are not eating a well rounded diet with lots of citrus fruit and uncooked vegetables, and are unlikely to change their eating habits significantly. Also, several studies show that a person who has one or two drinks per day has fewer heart attacks than one who doesn’t drink at all. Scripture says “use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake, and thine often infirmities” (1 Timothy 5:23).
Quiet even for a few moments relaxes both physical and mental tension. Ernest Rossi’s (1991) recognition of our daily ultradian rhythms, and the value of a short retreat at those times of day, has become part of my own self-care (I have a reclining chair in my office) and I recommend it to my patients. A few moments of feeling love or gratitude restores cardiac coherence (Servan-Schreiber 2004). “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).
Laughter is its own reward and controlled studies show that it enhances the immune system. Anecdotally, Norman Cousins’ self-cure of the autoimmune disorder ankylosing spondylitis with laughter and vitamin C is classic (Cousins 1979). “A merry heart works like a medicine” according to Solomon (Proverbs 17:22).
* * *
* * *
80. Laughter therapy
* * *
A group in Shanghai uses laughter as prophylaxis against cancer. They were shown on the Noetic Science video series The Heart of Healing (1992). This fits with the anti-stress treatment that Norman Cousins used.
Pain and depression go together, and patients with either seldom laugh. Robert Heath, MD, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane, did experiments using deep probes into animal and human brains to locate a “pleasure center” in the septal region. In the booklet that summarizes his work (Heath, 1996) he says: “Physical pain of various origins was alleviated promptly and dramatically by electrical stimulation of sites in the brain’s pleasure system. The pain of metastatic carcinoma, uncontrolled by high doses of morphine, for example, was relieved for as long as a week after stimulation of the septal region for 15 minutes (100 Hz, 3-5 amperes)” (Peacock, 1954). For seven months before she died, patient A-6 (L.W.) who had carcinoma of the uterus, received electrical stimulation of the septal region at intervals of one day to one week (depending on control of pain). During that period, she was essentially free of pain and required no further analgesic medication. He notes that when pleasure takes over, pain disappears.
I teach my patients to use self-hypnosis to find their “laughing place.” In the Disney movie Song of the South, Br’er Rabbit sings “Everybody’s got a laughing place” (Thing 48).
* * *
* * *
81. Hearing under anesthesia
* * *
Timid animals (rabbits, deer, humans, etc.) need to be aware of predators while there is still time for escape. They protect themselves with all five senses. But in order to close the eyes and sleep when danger lurks, they must depend on smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Of these, only hearing warns of danger before it is too late, and this is the last sense to go before actually dying.
We know how a mother with a newborn child can sleep through a thunderstorm, but becomes wide awake if the infant barely whimpers. This is selective hearing and can happen under general anesthesia, usually selecting the voices of the two people who are in control, the anesthetist and the surgeon.
The ultimate experiment on hearing under anesthesia was Levinson’s test of anesthetizing a cat down to a flat line EEG, then bringing a dog into the lab. When the dog barked, the cat’s EEG spiked (Levinson 1990).
When a patient’s symptoms have been “Ever since my … surgery,” hypnosis with multiple ideomotor reviews will often recover something alarming that the surgeon or anesthetist said during anesthesia. The hypnotic technique to recover this is precise. None of those who say it can’t be recovered have used David Cheek’s technique (Cheek 1959, Ewin 1990). What is recalled has three qualities: (1) it is salient, (2) it is said by the surgeon or the anesthetist, and (3) it is said at an appropriate time during the procedure. At the time the initial incision is being made for an exploratory abdominal operation, the suggestion “Everything is OK” is inappropriate, but while closing the wound after the exploration it is timely and welcome.
I had a disabled patient who had no conscious memory of his surgery, but in hypnotic regression heard his neurosurgeon say during back surgery “I’ll fix him” (Thing 10), and he never recovered from surgery. All I did in trance, after learning the surgeon’s comment, was reword it to “I�
�ll repair this.” Along with a normal neurological exam and reassurance that his MRI and x-rays were OK, he went into a work hardening program and returned to work after two years of barely getting out of a chair.
101 Things I Wish I'd Known When I Started Using Hypnosis Page 5