The brave patient gave up anesthesia for a while in an operation during which a surgeon sawed off his ankle. In order to numb the pain, he decided to use hypnosis.
Professional hypnotherapist Alex Lenki was on the operating table six times without general anesthesia. According to him, he prefers to immerse himself in a hypnotic trance, rather than using traditional drugs that cause loss of consciousness.
During his last ankle replacement surgery, he even asked orthopedic surgeon Dominik Nielsen, "How are you?"
Nielsen, who performed the operation at an English hospital in Surrey, admitted that he was pretty nervous when he made the first incision. All the same, it is more difficult to operate on a patient who remains conscious. However, the surgeon experienced difficulties only for the first few minutes.
“He underwent the operation surprisingly well. To be honest, this operation was similar to all those that I have done before. It took Alex an hour to sink himself into a trance. After 60 minutes, he told us that we can start,”Nielsen says.
As the surgeon admitted after the operation, he doubted that the man would withstand such a painful operation. He says that at first he was in constant tension, expecting the patient to scream in pain.
However, the man withstood, and apparently did not experience any discomfort during the operation. Lenki, 66, even commented on the noise of a saw that the surgeon used to cut his bone.
Promotional video:
“It was weird. He plunged himself into a trance and just lay there. Nothing seemed to bother him at all,”Nielsen says.
However, until the very end of the operation, the surgeon did not let the anesthesiologist out of the operating room, so that if Lenka's hypnosis failed, quickly deprive the patient of his senses.
Lenka, who has been using self-hypnosis since the age of 17, said that the doctors agreed to perform the operation without anesthesia only because of his "track record." Prior to that, he had already undergone six operations without anesthesia, including surgery on the arm, removal of a hernia and release of a pinched nerve in the elbow joint.
“I'm not against anesthesia, it's just that my way of controlling pain is much better than what doctors suggest. In addition, I recover much faster, because my body does not have to get rid of chemicals,”said Lenki.