The article hypnosis with medical and surgical patients by David Spiegel examines the role of hypnosis as a tool to treat patients. The Webster’s dictionary defines hypnosis as “state that resembles sleep but in which you can hear and respond to questions and suggestions”. Hypnosis is practice that puts the participant in a sort of trance or state of mind in which they are highly susceptible to suggestions. Hypnosis has been used throughout history for many different reasons including: guided relaxation and focused concentration. Hypnosis is widely known for its use by magicians but recently in the last century a new use for hypnosis has been revealed. Discoveries over the last century show that hypnosis has medical applications that can potentially prove beneficial tool for treating medical and surgical patients. In this article many of the applications of hypnosis in modern medicine for treating “anxiety, pain, …show more content…
The article even explains how exactly hypnosis helps to treat patients with some of the illnesses listed earlier however it does little to explain the effectiveness of hypnotic treatment options. While the article does mention many of uses of hypnosis it doesn’t explain how successful and realistically useful hypnosis itself is to be used as a treatment method. The article also fails to adequately highlight and mention the use of hypnosis as an alternative for anesthesia in surgery; although this could possibly be because the surgical hypnosis was not prevalent as some of the other medical applications when the article was written. While the article does an effective job of mentioning many of the medical applications of hypnosis in treatment it doesn’t mention the surgical applications of hypnosis as an alternative to anesthesia particularly in patients who are allergic to