Dr. David Spiegel

Then when you give a cutoff signal, touch the elbow, does the usual sensation and control return?

Did they respond to that cutoff?

Did they have a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy in their hand and then elsewhere in the body?

And so after that five minutes, I have a very clear idea of how hypnotizable people are and how to work with them based on their degree of hypnotizability.

Commonly for problems like stress and anxiety because they can very quickly learn to soothe and disconnect that sort of snowball effect of the reaction to the problem from what initiated it for pain.

And so I resonated with your wonderful book because it's very useful for pain control.

We published a study in The Lancet in 2000, randomized clinical trial, patients having things threaded through their arteries, and we randomized them into three conditions.

Standard care, which meant press a button, get opioids into your bloodstream.

That plus a friendly nurse providing emotional support, or that plus hypnosis.

And the average pain ratings in the standard care group

were 7 out of 10.

In the nursing support group, were 4 out of 10.

And in the hypnosis group, 1 out of 10.

Wow.

And they were using half as much of the opioid injection.

Now, Sanjay, if we published that, and it was a drug that produced that,

Every hospital in the country would be using that drug now because it worked extremely well.

It costs virtually nothing and there are no side effects.

Right.

But there's also no big industry pushing it.