How Can Hypnosis Help With Medical Conditions?

Your mind does control your body and to treat medical conditions as purely physical symptoms would be to deny this very basic fact. Hypnosis is a way in which you can access the inner workings of your mind and therefore enable therapeutic intervention.

The power of the mind over the body is undeniable. Science has for a long time now been providing proof for this fact. Patients in chronic pain can use mental exercises to reduce their perception of discomfort. People vulnerable to heart attacks can learn how to mentally slow down their heart rate, people suffering from stress can learn how to use their minds to reduce their blood pressure, women have been taught how to control pain in child birth, and even operations have been performed using hypno-anesthesia.

As well as this, no matter what supposedly incurable diseases there are, there is always somebody who has been cured of it. You may have heard of the miracle man, Morris Goodman, who crashed his airplane and was told he would be a "vegetable" for the rest of his life. He was told he would never breathe on his own without a respirator, he was told he would never walk again. As he says, the only thing he had was his mind, but as long as you have your mind you can put things together again - and this is what he did. As he began to breathe on his own again, the medical team couldn't work out how he had done it. As he walked out of the hospital, they didn't understand that either. It didn't make medical sense, but there is no denying that he healed himself through the power of the suggestions which he gave to himself. And every human being has this ability, this power, within them.

There is no doubt that the mind does indeed control the body. This idea has been known and acknowledged in all ancient cultures across the globe - Greece, China, India, Hawaii, etc. It is only in the Western world where medical research has somehow, over time, come to view the mind and body as separate entities rather than treating the whole person in a holistic manner. But there is now a return towards the acknowledgment of this mind-body connection. There is an increasing body of scientific evidence which reflects this and at the same time proves that the mind controls the body.

In the 1920's Dr Edmund Jacobson, physiologist and foremost researcher on relaxation, proved that when one has stressful anxious thoughts one cannot have relaxed muscles. More recently, Herbert Benson, medical doctor at Harvard Medical School, stated that "because of the fundamental unity of the mind and body it is impossible for one aspect to be relaxed while the other is tense".

In a meta-study on the effective use of adjunctive hypnosis with surgical patients, researchers at the Mount Sinai School of medicine in New York found that patients in hypnosis treatment groups had better clinical outcomes than 89% of patients in control groups. Not only that, they discovered that this result was irrespective of the method of hypnotic induction, be it live or recorded.

The only way in which you can achieve good health and well being is to pay close attention to your mind as well as your body.

Every time you pick up a paper these days there is an article pointing out the fact that your mind and body are intrinsically linked. As Dr John Hagelin says "our body is really the product of our thoughts. We're beginning to understand in medical science the degree to which the nature of thoughts and emotions actually determines the physical substance and structure and function of our bodies". And to quote Dr John Demartini "Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know that we have an imbalanced perspective".

Hypnosis is both normal and natural, and whilst you are in hypnosis you have access to your subconscious mind - the part which knows just what to do and how to do it, the part which acts automatically and spontaneously. Thus these special dynamics can be utilized to facilitate therapeutic intra-psychological communications. Hypnosis allows contact with your inner mind; it allows communication with your physiological functions.

As Michael Bernard Beckwith says "The question frequently asked is "when a person has manifested a disease in the body, can it be turned around through the power of right thinking?" and the answer is absolutely, yes".

It has been scientifically proven that each mental event triggers off nervous system activity which connects it to all other areas of the brain. Substantial evidence from psycho-neuro-immunology suggests that the mind and body communicate with each other in a directional flow of hormones and neurotransmitters. Thus every idea, thought and belief has a neurochemical consequence. Mental images, through your neural pathways, are able to transport messages throughout your entire organism.

This means that visualization techniques and symbolic imagery can be used to aid a return to normal healthy bodily functioning (for example, lowering your blood pressure, overcoming IBS), and also to kick start your body's natural ability to self heal. Your body is a self healing organism. If you cut yourself, that cut will heal all on its own. You have an immune system which guards against illness. Your body is in fact designed to heal itself. Your body knows how to return to a state of homeostasis.

As well as these more specific types of symbolic imagery, abstract imagery can be utilized - images to assist you in letting go of worries and tensions and gaining a feeling of lightness and brightness, well-being and harmony. Your imagination is limitless. It has no boundaries. A picture is worth a thousand words and a metaphor is worth a million. The creative use of metaphorical language is incredibly powerful.

Relaxation and hypnosis form the basis of this therapeutic process. Relaxation decreases the background noises and criticisms of the mind and allows you the ideal state within which to allow your creative mind to surface, thus enabling you to focus and have therapeutic direction. Hypnosis allows mental thoughts and images to have greater clarity and focus, and it allows feelings such as self-confidence, well-being and harmony to be more easily elicited.

Whilst in hypnosis your mind is very open to visualizations and you have the ability to create a more powerful sensory experience. The more real the experience becomes in the subconscious mind during this state, the more effect it will have upon what you wish to achieve. A thought without emotion doesn't have any effect. Emotions are what trigger the limbic system and the neurotransmitters which send messages throughout your entire body.

And so hypnosis can help with medical conditions in many different ways. Your mind does control your body and to treat medical conditions as purely physical symptoms would be to deny this very basic fact.

by : Roseanna Leaton

Source : www.articlesfactory.com