Do you agree to go to the operating table without anesthesia? To most of us, this may seem inconceivable. But 66-year-old Alex Lenka had to undergo operations without anesthesia seven times. The fact is that Lenki is a professional hypnotherapist and prefers a hypnotic trance to chemical sleep. The patient is awake, he simply does not feel pain.
Alex has been engaged in self-hypnosis since the age of 17. And so successfully that he underwent six operations without anesthesia - in particular, an intervention on the arm, removal of a hernia, and also release of a pinched elbow joint. Alex had his last ankle replacement surgery at Surrey Hospital, England. The surgeon Dominik Nielsen, who operated on Lenka, at first was seriously afraid that hypnosis would not work, and expected that the patient was about to scream in pain. But that didn't happen.
“It took Alex an hour to put himself into a trance,” Nielsen recalls. "After 60 minutes, he told us we can start." Apparently, Lenka did not feel any discomfort. During the operation, he even asked the doctor how he was doing, and calmly commented on the sounds of the saw with which the surgeon sawed the bone. “It was weird. He plunged himself into a trance and just lay there. It seemed that absolutely nothing bothered him,”the doctor commented.
True, for safety reasons, there was still an anesthesiologist in the operating room to quickly give anesthesia if Lenka's "method" suddenly failed. “I'm not against anesthesia, it's just that my way of controlling pain is much better than what doctors suggest,” says Lenki. "Also, I heal much faster because my body doesn't have to get rid of chemicals."
Indeed, the use of anesthesia during surgery has a lot of side effects. If the operation is performed under general anesthesia, then the body then requires a long recovery period.
In medicine, there is a fairly large experience of "hypnotic" pain relief. So, back in the 19th century, when there were practically no means of chemical anesthesia, they resorted to hypnosis when removing breast cancer. The Englishman Dr. Ward used it for amputations. His colleague and compatriot surgeon Eliot performed more than 300 operations under hypnosis, and the Indian doctor Esdeil - 600. In Russia, the first such practice was applied in 1915 by P. Podyampolsky, whose example was followed more than once by other surgeons …
Probably, many remember how in the late 80s they broadcast on television sessions of the famous psychotherapist Anatoly Kashpirovsky, in which he conducted "hypnotic pain relief" to the patient during the operation. Moreover, the hypnotist was at that time in Moscow, and the patient was in Kiev. Subsequently, conflicting information appeared in the press. Some stated that it was just a well-staged show, others cited excerpts from an interview with the same woman in which she claimed that she was in terrible pain and had to sing in order not to scream, and still others argued that everything seen on the screen was the truth. …
In April 2006, Kashpirovsky's "feat" was repeated by hypnotist John Butler, who assisted Tom Henningham, a surgeon at Princess Royal Hospital in Farnborough. The operation was broadcast live on British television. Butler managed to plunge the patient into a state of "deep relaxation" for 45 minutes. Two years later, in Tehran, at the Payambaran clinic, two caesarean sections were performed using hypnosis. Both ended successfully, the children were born healthy.
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Recently, professor of medicine David Spiegel from Stanford University (USA) appealed to members of the British Royal Society of Medicine, urging them to abandon anesthesia in favor of hypnosis in some abdominal operations. “Hypnosis has no negative side effects,” the professor said. “With its help, the operation is fast, during which the patient can maintain continuous contact with the surgeon, besides, hypnosurgery is cheaper than anesthesia, it does not interfere with the work of the patient's body, and he recovers faster after surgery."
But all people have different susceptibility to suggestion. Some give in to him easily, others with great difficulty. In addition, most patients simply do not trust such a technique and are horrified when they are offered to go under the knife without chemical anesthesia … Therefore, even if hypnosis is used for these purposes, experts say, it is necessary that an anesthesiologist be in the operating room. able to give anesthesia in the event of severe pain.