Dr. David Spiegel

Her mother stopped crying.

The nurse ran out of the room.

My intern came into the room looking for me, and I thought he was going to pat me on the back.

He said, I need to inform you that the nurse has informed the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent.

Now, two things about that.

Massachusetts has a lot of weird laws, but that is not one of them.

And her mother was standing right next to me when I did it.

So he said, you have to stop doing this.

And I said, oh, really?

Why?

He said, well, it could be dangerous.

And I thought that anything that could help a patient that much that fast and violate a non-existent Massachusetts law had to be worth looking into.

And I've been doing it ever since.

And the thing is, it was like right in front of my eyes.

There's no other explanation.

You could see it happening.

Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention, Sanjay.

Have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and you enter the imagined world?

That's what hypnosis is.

It's believed in imagination.