Humorous Medicine

Humorous Medicine

Have you ever been to a comedy club and witnessed an act of hypnosis? It’s quite amusing how the comedian can get a person to do such foolish things without them knowing exactly what is going on. This act of humor has been around for ages. It can be traced back to even the first documents recorded by ancient Egyptians. Today the act of hypnosis is being explored by doctors as possible means of medical treatment. Since this has only been accepted as theory, there are many skeptics out there who do not believe in this. Religious fanatics make up a large portion of this. They believe it is some kind of voodoo. Many questions come about when exploring the medical aspect of hypnotherapy. How does it work? Is it effective? How come more doctors haven’t explored these means of treatment?

Hypnosis has been practiced in one form or another throughout all of recorded history. Many historians can trace it back to the records kept in ancient temples of the early Egyptians. In the 1700s people accredited the German physician Fran Anton Mesmer with being the father of modern hypnosis. In 1773, he developed a technique known as Mesmerism. From this technique we have derived the term �mesmerized’ to describe someone in an altered state of awareness. Mesmer’s theory was based on using magnets and iron rods to re-align the �magnetic field of the body’. Other physicians also made contributions to the theory of hypnosis such as: James Braid, and Sigmund Freud in the 1800s as well as Milton Erickson in the 1900s whose theories are still used as the cornerstone of hypnotherapy (Aktned).

Despite the acknowledgment of hypnosis, many popular misconceptions arise, such that it is some kind of truth serum and that subjects lose all free will. In reality, most of us have experienced hypnosis one time or another in our everyday lives. You may have been in a kind of hypnotic trance without knowing it. When reading a book and getting deep into it, sometimes we don’t notice that time is flying by, or someone could have called our name numerous times and we didn’t hear them. The hypnotized person is not asleep or unconscious for that matter. The hypnotherapist does no use a pocket watch but more often uses a variety of verbal guidance techniques. Hypnosis creates a hyper-attentive