CRI听力:Hypnosis Used for Surgical Operations

This patient may be going under the surgeon's knife, but as far as her mind is concerned, she's many miles away from here.

The anesthetist here is more interested in keeping her mind in an altered state, rather than calculating how to keep her unconscious with drugs. So effectively this patient isn't here in the operating theatre. She's hiking up the French Alps with friends, admiring the scenery, tasting the fresh air and enjoying her holiday.

Anesthetist Professor Fabienne Roelantz whispers, telling her, her muscles are relaxing. She tells the patient she may close her eyes to increase her concentration. The lights in theatre are deliberately green to aid relaxation.

This team now uses hypnosis combined with a local anesthetic to dull the patient's sense of pain. It's used in a third of thyroid removals and a quarter of breast cancer procedures, including biopsies.

They claim studies on patients at this hospital show hypnosis aids the healing process, reduces drug use and cuts the time the patient needs to stay in hospital.

Here in Brussels, St Luc Hospital hopes to expand the technique to procedures like hernias, knee arthroscopies and plastic surgery procedures. The surgeon here Professor Michel Mourad says it's important the entire surgical team controls their emotions throughout the operation:

"It's vital to create an atmosphere of tranquility for the patient, and this is also an atmosphere of tranquility for the medical team. One of the fundamentals is to avoid sudden noises which would bring the patient out of his hypnotic state."

According to anesthetist Dr. Fabienne Roelantz hypnosis is a modified state of consciousness. She says:

"After the procedure, they are here, they are present right away, it improves the healing process, it reduces post-surgery pain and it reduces the use of painkillers. People feel great right away so they can leave hospital earlier."

The US doesn't have guidelines for the use of hypnosis. The American Society of Anesthetists isn't convinced, arguing that it would be impossible to use hypnosis for major operations like heart surgery, or operations that involve other internal organs because the pain would be unbearable.

It cautions that hypnosis is not effective for everyone and it takes much longer to start working. Some doctors fear that the patient will have no protection from pain if they suddenly regain consciousness during an operation where their abdomen, or chest is open. They say this would result in the patient needing swift sedation anyway.

Associate Professor Guy Montgomery at New York's Mount Sinai Medical Centre says there are a host of reasons why it's not more popular amongst medical practitioners.

"The providers have to be comfortable with the idea of using hypnosis intervention and recommending it and know the literature and the research well enough to say you know what this is not just a parlour trick, it's not just something that's done in the entertainment industry or in a creative movie plot but rather it's something that can be used and can be highly effective to improve our patients quality of life."

But even in Brussels the team says hypnosis can't and should not be used for complicated surgery which is likely to last more than three hours.

For CRI, I am Li Dong.