Reprinted with permission from The Eagle Tribune, Sunday, March 28, 2004

Hypnosis

By Julie Kirkwood Staff Writer

Haverhill resident Rick Iannalfo, 44, got a ribbing from his buddies at Tuesday night darts recently after his first hypnotherapy appointment for weight loss at Valley Hypnosis in Methuen.

The minute he walked in the door, they shouted "Abracadabra!" and commanded him to do silly things. Iannalfo took it in stride. He didn't believe in hypnosis at first, either.

"I kind of laughed at it at first," he said. "It's just different. I really can't describe it."

And Iannalfo got the last laugh at his second hypnosis appointment when he weighed in and found out he had lost five pounds in two weeks.

Ever since Bela Lugosi starred in the 1941 B-movie "Invisible Ghost," in which he commits gruesome murders while hypnotized, and the spate of similar plot lines that followed, hypnotism has suffered from stigma, stereotype and misconception, coming in and out of vogue like the cliched swinging pendulum. But with the backing of a series of new medical studies, hypnosis is back, possibly to stay. Around the region, hypnotists are working as entertainers, success coaches, habit breakers and even in hospitals.

Academic journals have been peppered with hypnosis studies in the past few years. Hypnosis is now believed to be at least partially effective for pain relief, irritable bowel syndrome, warts, headaches, wound healing, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, smoking cessation and weight loss.

Hypnotist Tom Nicoli of "A Better You Hypnosis" in Woburn has been lecturing on hypnosis at Harvard Medical School and around the country for years.

"It's nothing new," Nicoli said. "It's just surfacing again."

Nicoli attributes recent surge in interest to the baby boom generation, which has been the driving force behind the mainstream acceptance of a wide array of alternative therapies.

"They were the ones who questioned, who looked for different ways," Nicoli said, "who didn't just accept what doctors told them."

Nicoli still encounters hypnotism skeptics in the medical community. One doctor approached him after a lecture, he said, and told him, "Sounds good, but if I can't X-ray it, I can't believe it."

Nicoli challenged the doctor to think again.

"What I'm talking about is what happens every time you give somebody a placebo," he said. "It's the suggestion, not the sugar pill, that creates the effect."

A mother kissing her child's scraped knee could be considered hypnosis, he said. Hypnosis is simply the process of suggesting something directly to a person's subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind is open to suggestion whenever the conscious mind tunes out and we enter a mild trance-like state, Nicoli said. This can happen in a therapist's office behind flickering sunglasses, in a department store when our mind drifts away and we don't notice the line has moved forward, driving in the car when we slip into 'autopilot,' or sitting in front of the television. It can happen while we knit or read or pray.

Nicoli compares the conscious mind to anti-virus software: turn it off, and anything can get through. Advertisers have long taken advantage of our suggestibility in this trance state, which is why billboards and television commercials are so effective.

The reason hypnosis works as therapy for things like smoking cessation or weight loss, he said, is the subconscious mind is the home of our emotional voids and emotional pain. When the conscious and subconscious mind come into conflict, the subconscious always wins. So a person may know that smoking is bad or that they should not supersize their meal, but if the subconscious mind wants tobacco or a pound of french fries for some emotional reason, it will have its way.

"Why do you think we have habits?" Nicoli said. "Because we want them? No, but we do."

You're feeling ... calm

Now, hypnotists are even showing up at hospitals after a 2002 study on the use of hypnosis prior to surgery. Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center compared the cost of sedating patients in certain surgeries with the cost of sedation plus hypnotherapy. The patients receiving hypnotherapy tended to have shorter hospital stays and need less medication, and on average cost $300 per patient. Those who did not have hypnotherapy cost more than double that amount, $638 per patient.

Mary "Mae" DeLuca, 57, tried hypnosis last summer before weight-loss surgery at Salem (Mass.) Hospital. Previous surgeries had caused her pain and anxiety, but her surgery experience with hypnosis was entirely different.

DeLuca met with hypnotherapist and Reiki master Karen Pischke two weeks before surgery. The session was recorded on an audio tape that she listened to every night until the surgery.

The tape lulled DeLuca into a state of hypnosis by having her imagine herself at the beach. Her subconscious mind then absorbed such messages as: You will arrive at the hospital feeling relaxed, you will hear and remember only positive comments in the operating room, and any discomfort you feel upon waking from surgery will be minor.

DeLuca was so relaxed before surgery she didn't even notice when the nurse drew blood. After the operation, performed with ordinary sedatives, she woke up without any nausea or pain. After leaving the hospital four days later, she needed not so much as a Tylenol, "which is a miracle," she said, "because with my hip I had all kinds of medicines."

Pischke has seen these results numerous times since she started using hypnosis with surgery patients last year. One recent morning as Pischke prepared a man for surgery, the nurse warned her it would be difficult to insert the intravenous line because the patient's veins were constricted. Pischke talked the patient into a relaxed state and asked him to visualize relaxation flowing into his left hand, allowing his blood vessels to dilate. The nurse inserted the I.V. with no trouble.

Dr. Frederick Buckley Jr., chief of general surgery at Salem Hospital, has occasionally invited Pischke into the operating room with him at the request of patients. He does it for the same reason he lets patients choose the background music during surgery, he said.

"Anything that puts them more at ease is a good thing," Buckley said.

Occasionally his patients choose to listen to their hypnosis tape during surgery, he said, and his operating room team will gladly flip over the tape at the end of each side. Some people are just naturally relaxed and easygoing with surgery and don't need hypnosis, Buckley said. But those who have anxiety about surgery seem to get out of bed faster and have a better overall experience after hypnosis.

"I believe in it," Buckley said. "These things do work."

You're feeling ... healthy.

Valley Hypnosis in Methuen, where Iannalfo went for his treatment, has binders in its waiting room full of testimonial letters from patients who have broken habits or improved their health through hypnosis. One little girl got rid of warts, a boy with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder learned to focus, and several people said they quit smoking or lost weight. Many of them were referred to hypnosis by local physicians.

"What we've been doing here has been around for thousands of years," said Iannalfo's hypnotherapist Tom Vitale, also known by his stage name Tommy Vee. "It's becoming more and more popular. Thirty years ago, if you said, 'I'm going to a hypnotist,' people would say, 'What? Are you crazy?'"

As the stage name implies, Vitale works the hypnosis entertainment circuit outside the office, just like his father, Jerry Valley. On stage, father and son coax hypnotized volunteers to forget their names, speak phony foreign languages or think they have 11 fingers.

For example, in one of his shows Tommy Vee convinces a young woman to forget the number eight. The woman, standing on a stage, is alert but oblivious to the laughing of the audience. She nods and says she understands the suggestion. Then he asks her to hold up both hands and count her fingers. She counts: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine, 10, 11. She shoots the hypnotist an annoyed expression and counts again. Eleven. She shakes her head in disbelief and the audience roars.

Some hypnotists scoff at such stage shows and believe it weakens support for the true therapeutic benefits of hypnosis.

But hypnosis is the same, whether on stage or in the hospital.

"It's all hypnosis," Vitale said.

Despite what Bela Lugosi movies imply, hypnotists stress they cannot make a person do anything they don't want to do. It's up to the subject to take the suggestion, whether it be relaxing in the operating room or goofing around in front of an audience. Also, most subjects remember 50 percent to 100 percent of what happens to them under hypnosis, so it is highly unlikely that a hypnotized murderer would not remember his crimes.

DeLuca has lost 96 pounds in the seven months since her weight-loss surgery. And she is also still reaping the benefits of hypnosis. Along with the surgery messages, her audio tape included suggestions about her eating habits. It told her she would eat only to nourish her body, that fruits and vegetables would appeal to her and junk food would not.

The true test, she said, was when the Girl Scout cookies came out at work this year. DeLuca didn't eat any.

"I had no desire," she said. "It wasn't like I even needed to fight it. It was a miracle."