Geoffrey Knight

I have wanted to come out and write about healing in hypnosis, but up to now I have felt confined to the closet because most conventional medical practitioners think it’s a joke, something for mass entertainment. The present day doctor was brought up in the belief system of modern science that has driven allopathic medicine for the last one hundred and forty years. If the efficacy of a treatment has not been demonstrated in controlled clinical trials, it is unconventional, dangerous and can't be said to work. Furthermore, anything that cannot be proven scientifically should not be practiced.

I want to remind these doctors that healing in hypnosis has been around for at least 5000 years. There is ample evidence that at the time of Ramses II in ancient Egypt (he built the great pyramid in Giza as his mausoleum) there existed temples of healing in which people would be put in hypnosis for periods of up to seven days. Later in ancient Greece the Temple of Aesculapius at Epidaurus was a revered place of healing in hypnosis. Belief in miraculous healing has persisted to this day.

I, however, don’t claim to use miraculous powers to heal anybody, because any person who comes to me heals himself. I am simply the facilitator. I induce the hypnotic state and act as their guide and instructor, showing how and where to heal themselves.

I recently had a young man as a client who was a butcher and severed the thumb from his left hand with a band saw whilst cutting up a carcass. Using the wonderful technology of modern medicine doctors were able to sew his thumb back on, although it took three operations, as the blood wasn’t circulating properly.

The first thing I did was to address, in hypnosis, the multiple traumas surrounding the incident. Aside from the shock of severing his thumb, he had considerable anger. He was angry at his employers for the callous manner in which he was treated at the time of the accident, and at the first hospital he was taken to, where they made him fill in 5 sets of forms and took various tests, while he repeatedly passed out from shock. It took five hours from the time of the accident until he was taken to another hospital and operated on. It was essential to desensitize these events; otherwise he would carry these strong emotions of anger within himself for the rest of his life.

I then taught him self-hypnosis and showed him how to visualize, in hypnosis, how his thumb was healing: seeing the calcium growing from the end of the severed bones and then coming together and fusing: seeing the skin regenerating and the blood circulating perfectly.

I was able to teach him how the discomfort (the word “Pain” was never mentioned) in his arm, hand and thumb could be alleviated by blocking it with the power of his mind and transferred to another part of his anatomy.

It is now two months since the accident. The bones have fused, the skin is rapidly regenerating and the whole healing process has been accelerated. A fourth operation and skin graft have been cancelled, and his surgeon told him, "I don't know what you're doing, but keep it up!"

Equally importantly, he has no ‘Hang up’ about his employers or the treatment he experienced in the first hospital and no intention suing anyone. He is able let go of the past and get on with the present and the future of his family and himself.

This is the healing of mind and body. It is an inseparable combination, and rarely practiced by allopathic medical people because they appear to think that the connection between the mind and the body is irrelevant. I suspect that this is one of the reasons why the man in the street is turning more often today to alternative medicine and spiritual healing. If the American Medical Association continues to ignore the necessity to treat the mind as well as the body, physicians following its lead blindly do so at their own peril.

Geoffrey Knight is a clinical hypnotherapist and a Member of the Oregon Hypnotherapy Association. He can be reached at (503) 246-7300. Address: 2387 NW Kearney St, Portland, OR 97210. E-mail Geoffrey@Knight.net, Web: Geoffrey.Knight.net