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| Could hypnotism replace anaesthetics in surgery? |
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| Paranormal & Unexplained, | |
| Written by Danny Penman | |
 It was a beautiful sunny day in the Cotswolds. Six paragliders were circling like eagles on powerful currents of rising air. Children gazed with open mouths as the aircraft dived and swooshed silently above their heads. Old men watched with glee as they remembered their days flying with the RAF. One of the pilots broke away from the group and a powerful gust of wind hit his paraglider, turning the canopy inside out. He began spinning like a sycamore seed towards the earth. After what seemed an eternity, the young man smashed into the hillside, driving the lower part of his right leg through the knee and into his thigh. He lay face down on the ground, blood trickling from his mouth. After a moment of stunned silence, he began screaming in agony. The omens did not look good. Medical help with painkilling morphine was at least 30 minutes away and it would take another hour to reach hospital. To make matters even worse, he knew that he couldn’t afford to lose consciousness because he might never again awaken if his skull had been fractured in the fall. The coming hours were going to be hellish. Something stronger than a ‘stiff upper lip’ was called for. He slowly began to suppress the pain of his shattered leg using a form of self-hypnosis he’d read about as a child. He began by forcing himself to breathe slowly and deeply before imagining himself in a beautiful garden full of brightly coloured flowers. A fountain tinkled gently in the background. 
And inch-by-inch the agony receded before, finally, becoming isolated and distant. The hypnosis had worked. This story may seem like an apocryphal tale – something you’d expect to read about in a boy’s magazine from the days of empire. But I know this story to be true because I was that young man who crashed his paraglider. I know for a fact that it is possible to control extreme pain, even the agony of a leg and knee shattered in a dozen places, using nothing more than hypnosis and the power of the mind. This experience came back to me last week when I read the remarkable tale of Leslie Mason. He, you will recall, had two teeth and their roots removed using hypnosis rather than an anaesthetic. “The dentist had to dig away at the rotten roots of my teeth that were right up into my jaw,” said Mr Mason. “I didn’t feel any pain.” Teeth removed without an anaesthetic? The mere idea makes any sane person squirm. And yet dentists, and even surgeons, are increasingly turning to hypnosis to replace a general anaesthetic. They claim that hypnosis has no negative side effects, is cheaper, and the patient recovers faster too. Dr Mike Gow, a dentist based in Glasgow routinely uses hypnosis to carry out oral surgery. Amanda Maxwell, one of his patients, recently had a tooth removed and replaced with a crown using hypnosis. Four titanium screws were driven into her jawbone as part of the operation. As you can imagine, such an operation would normally be excruciatingly painful and would certainly need a general anaesthetic, but she described the process as entirely painless. “I’m quite a wimp when it comes to pain,” says Amanda. “But during the operation my mind was elsewhere so it didn’t hurt at all. As far as I was concerned, I was walking along a beautiful beach looking at the sea. I could hear the machine drilling into my jaw but it didn’t bother me at all.” Dr Gow uses a standard ‘light trance’ form of hypnosis, which is about as far as it’s possible to get from the drama of a stage hypnotist. Dr Gow asks his patients to breath slowly and deeply before imagining themselves in a beautiful, peaceful place. This could be their favourite childhood bedroom or a sandy beach on a summer’s day. They are then asked to imagine pain as a dial running from one to ten. They control the level of pain by simply turning down the dial. “Dr Gow told me that if the pain rose above six or eight then I should ask for an anaesthetic,” says Amanda. “It never rose above two or three during the entire operation. It didn’t hurt at all.” Doctors are also carrying out major operations using hypnosis. One team in Belgium has operated on over 6,000 patients using hypnosis combined with a light local anaesthetic. The local anaesthetic is used only to deaden the surface of the skin whilst a scalpel slices through it. It has no effect inside the body. “The patient is conscious throughout the whole operation,” says Professor Marie-Elisabeth Faymonville, head of the Pain Clinic at Liege University Hospital in Belgium. “This helps the doctor and patient work together. The patient may have to move during an operation and it’s very simple to get them to do that if they remain conscious. “We’ve performed over 1,000 thorax operations and many breast augmentation procedures. We’ve done a hysterectomy too. All were done without a general anaesthetic.” “I don’t think it would work for organ transplants though.” The idea of replacing anaesthetics with hypnosis in major surgery is beginning to be taken seriously in Britain too. New Scientist recently reported the remarkable case of 46-year-old Pippa Plaisted who had a breast cancer operation in London using hypnosis. Once again, Pippa was put into a light trance. Although her eyes were closed throughout the procedure, she remained fully awake and could hear the surgeon calmly telling her the details of the operation as he carried them out. “The surgeon was cutting and sewing inside me, but I could not feel any sensation at all," said Pippa. “After the operation I felt tired, but there was no nausea or wooziness. I had a clear head and felt totally normal.” Scientists are at a loss to explain how hypnosis manages to achieve seemingly miraculous levels of pain relief. One theory holds that hypnosis switches off the conscious mind and allows the hypnotist to communicate directly with the deep subconscious. In effect, the mind is switched off and can feel no pain. Another theory claims that the hypnotist is simply distracting the patient and uses the ‘power of suggestion’ to trick them into believing they are not in pain. Whichever theory is true; there is no doubt that it works. And it’s garnering powerful supporters in the medical establishment. Dr Martin Wall, President of the Royal Society of Medicine’s section on Hypnosis and Psychosomatic Medicine, says: “Pain is a construct conjured up by the brain. It’s not ‘real’. It’s simply a series of electrical impulses travelling to the brain. I tell my patients that they can interpret it however they want. “Hypnosis is a very powerful technique with a great many benefits for the patient. It’s a great way of relieving anxiety and boosting confidence. A patient’s whole life is improved.” Clearly hypnosis can be a very powerful tool for good – but can it also be used for evil purposes? After all, if a person can slip into a trance and be controlled by someone else, they might, unbeknown to them, end up being used for nefarious ends. It’s a common fear in anyone who has seen a stage hypnotist in action. Earlier in the year, this seems to have happened when a thief in Italy hypnotised supermarket cashiers and emptied their tills. The last thing they remember is a tall, dark mysterious man telling them to “Look into my eyes” before finding their tills empty. The US military has explored the possibility of using hypnosis to extract secrets and to ‘re-programme’ seemingly ordinary people to turn them into super-soldiers and assassins. Predictably, these themes have been explored by Hollywood in such films as the Manchurian Candidate and the Bourne Identity. As you will no doubt recall, in these films a person’s character is broken down and reprogrammed allowing them to become controlled by renegade agents. Few people know that both films were based on the work of the US psychologists JW Watkins and George Estabrooks. Both worked for the military on several clandestine projects. Watkins specialised in placing army recruits into deep trances and reprogramming them. In one infamous series of experiments he hypnotised soldiers and told them to attack senior officers. This, as you can imagine, is a huge taboo in the military and yet they did it with aplomb. One even pulled out a knife and attempted to stab an officer. Soldiers were also tricked into divulging military secrets whilst in a trance. But these experiments were discontinued after officers began revealing too many military secrets to hypnotists who did not have the necessary security clearance. The CIA also explored hypnosis. In 1953, the CIA director Allen Dulles kick-started several secret programmes when he announced that: “Mind warfare is the great battlefield of the Cold War and we have to do whatever it takes to win.” Morse Allen, a CIA researcher, soon managed to hypnotise one of his secretaries and ordered her to shoot her best friend. Mercifully, the gun she’d been given had been surreptitiously emptied of bullets before she pulled the trigger. Experiments of this type may have ended in tragedy. In 1953 Frank Olson, a scientist working on the top secret MKULTRA and Artichoke mind-control projects jumped to his death from the 10th floor of a hotel in New York. The official verdict was suicide but declassified documents and research by the Harvard academic and Canadian MP Michael Ignatieff paints a far darker picture. Olson had become sickened by the CIA’s mind-control experiments in which he had played a central role. He had sat in on a number of ‘terminal interrogations’ in which ‘expendables’ – captured Russian agents and Nazi prisoners - had been drugged and hypnotised. Olson confided in Norman Cournoyer, his colleague at the CIA bureau in Fort Detrick: “They didn’t mind if people came out of this or not. They might survive, they might not. They might be put to death.” After a chance meeting with a congregation of Quakers, Olson decided to quit the Agency. His colleagues assumed he had gone mad and persuaded him to seek counselling in New York. But he never received counselling. Instead, his drinks were spiked with LSD and he was interrogated. He was then taken to the apartment of the Broadway magician John Mulholland who is assumed to have hypnotised him. Officially, Olson fell to his death shortly afterwards. It certainly seems possible to hypnotise individuals into committing evil acts, but might it also be possible to do it on a mass scale? Could the entire population be hypnotised and reprogrammed? It’s the stuff of nightmares. And yet some fear it may be happening in a more subtle way through television and computer games. Dr Martin Wall, of the Royal Society of Medicine, describes the current generation of ultra-violent computer games and TV programmes as “intrinsically hypnotic”. “We’re all being hypnotised every time we look at the TV,” says Dr Wall. “That’s how the commercial world works. We’re being manipulated all of the time. “I especially worry about kids using computer games. They’re hypnotising themselves. It induces an altered state of consciousness that bypasses morality.” Having myself felt the power of hypnosis, I fear he may well be right. The sinister images caught on camera that could prove poltergeists DO exist... |
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