Hypnosedation: a valuable alternative to traditional anaesthetic techniques

Hypnosis has become routine practice in our plastic and endocrine surgery services. Revivication of pleasant life experiences has served as the hypnotic substratum in a series of over 1650 patients since 1992. In retrospective studies, followed by randomised prospective studies, we have confirmed the usefulness of hypnosedation (hypnosis in combination with conscious IV sedation) and local anaesthesia as a valuable alternative to traditional anaesthetic techniques. The credibility of hypnotic techniques and their acceptance by the scientific community will depend on independently-confirmed and reproducible criteria of assessing the hypnotic state. Based on the clinical success of this technique, we were interested in confirming this phenomenon in healthy volunteers. The revivication of pleasant life experiences thus served as the cornerstone of a basic research program developed to objectify the neurophysiological attributes of the hypnotic state. We compared hypnosis to normal alertness with similar thought content. In our experience, the activation profile obtained during the hypnotic state was completely different from simple re-memoration of the same subject matter during normal alertness. This represents an objective and independent criteria by which to assess the hypnotic state.