On one, I want you to do one thing: Look up. On two, do two things: Slowly close your eyes and take a deep breath. On three, do three things: Breathe out, relax your eyes, and let your body float. Imagine you are floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or just floating in space. Each breath is getting deeper and easier.
The patient is 80 years old. She is lying under the bright lights of an operating room at Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where radiologist Elvira Lang is about to thread a catheter through her arteries. The tiny tube will work its way to one of the woman’s kidneys, where it will block the organ’s blood supply. A surgeon is scheduled to remove the kidney the next day. Embolizing the kidney will help keep the operation simple, safe, and tidy. But the woman is running a fever, and her kidney may be infected. Because she ate earlier in the day, she can’t be given a sedative. What should have been a routine procedure has become an ordeal.
“This is your safe and pleasant place to be,” one of Lang’s associates reads from a laminated card. “You can use it in a sense to play a trick on the doctors. Your body has to be here, but you don’t.”
Lang is one of a growing number of hospital physicians who use hypnosis in addition to anesthesia. With David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, she has conducted extensive studies of hypnosis in the operating room, often with dramatic results. By adding hypnosis she can make an operation shorter, less painful, and less dependent on drugs. The hardest part of the procedure is getting other doctors to accept it.
