Fix Yourself With Hypnosis – Or Don’t

Holistic Survival PP Template with BorderJason Hartman’s recent discussion with Dr. Errol Gluck about the benefits of hypnosis (The Holistic Survival Show – episode #130) was a revealing look at an often misunderstood science, or superstition, depending upon your point of view. While we’re not here to sway your opinion on the matter one way or another, it’s an undeniable fact that, when modern medicine falls short, a variety of debilitating conditions have shown improvement through hypnosis.

What can hypnosis help? Here is a sampling:

Pain Management – from childbirth to cancer, people have long turned to hypnosis to cope with the debilitating effects of chronic pain. No lesser authority than the American Psychological Association concluded that highly susceptible individuals experienced significant pain reduction when compared to a placebo group.

How does it work? That’s obviously too in-depth an issue to address in the confines of this blog but Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett addressed the subject in a January 2001 article in Psychology Today: “A hypnotic trance is not therapeutic in and of itself, but specific suggestions and images fed to clients in a trance can profoundly alter their behavior. As they rehearse the new ways they want to think and feel, they lay the groundwork for changes in future actions.”

In addition to pain management, hypnosis has been found to help relieve irritable bowel syndrome, skin diseases like psoriasis, as well as serve as a catalyst for people trying to lose weight or stop smoking.

For decades, the military has been accused of mixing hypnosis into their repertoire of information gathering techniques. While no ever really knows what the military is or isn’t doing, a recently declassified document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act seems to indicate that the soldier boys weren’t all that impressed with hypnosis:

“The use of hypnosis in intelligence would present certain technical problems not encountered in the clinic or laboratory. To obtain compliance from a resistant source, for example, it would necessary to hypnotise the source under essentially hostile circumstances. There is no good evidence, clinical or experimental, that this can be done.”

More from the document…

“It would be difficult to find an area of scientific interest more beset by divided professional opinion and contradictory evidence…No one can say whether hypnosis is a qualitatively unique state with some physiological and conditioned response components or only a form of suggestion induced by high motivation and a positive relationship between hypnotist and subject.”

Finally…

“It is probably significant that in the long history of hypnosis, where the potential application to intelligence has always been known, there are no reliable accounts of its effective use by an intelligence service.”

And there you have it. If the military doesn’t understand it – there must be something to it!

The Holistic Survival Team

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