If somebody told you there was a medication that could treat 100 different conditions, didn't require a prescription, was free, and had no bad side effects, you wouldn't believe them. But increasingly hypnosis is gaining the stature of a magic wand.

Brain Mechanics

Psychologists describe hypnosis as an altered state of mind in which one's normal skepticism is largely suspended, allowing a patient to focus attention on a single image and be open to suggestions posed by a trained guide. Some Healing Power of Your Mind

practitioners call it daydreaming with purpose. It's similar to the absorption you experience when reading a good novel, watching an engrossing movie, or listening so intently to the car radio that you arrive home without a clue as to how you got there.

Now brain scan technology shows that hypnosis can alter the way sensory messages are received in the brain and experienced in the body. Brain-imaging studies conducted at the University of Iowa, reveal that hypnosis actually blocks pain signals from getting to the part of the brain responsible for conscious perception of discomfort. PET scans - which show active areas of the brain - also indicate that hypnotized people process suggested sounds and images in the same part of the brain that registerers real ones. That is, the brain accepts hallucinations as authentic. Simply imagining sensations, without hypnosis, doesn't have the same effect.

That, of course, is what makes hypnosis such a great stage act. In a trance, your senses can be tricked. You can be persuaded that a bottle of ammonia smells like perfume or that a large, fuzzy rabbit is sitting on your lap. But the brain effects also help explain why hypnosis has become so useful to modern medicine. It can make you conclude that chemotherapy isn't nauseating, for example, or that third-degree burns are not painful.

"Fantasy can preempt pain," explains Linda Thomson, PhD, a nurse practitioner and clinical hypnotherapist in Bellows Falls. VT. And because pain isn't good for you, reducing it can produce profound benefits. Few examples of hypnotic healing are as dramatic as those that come from treating burns.

One of the biggest risks after a severe burn is infection, which can Healing Power of Your Mind

lead to scarring, amputation, or even death. To prevent that, nurses at burn units have to remove patients' dead skin every day for several weeks, even months, in a process called debridement. The pain is so severe, it can cause more anguish than the original burn. To ease it, patients are given morphine and other powerful pain relievers, but those drugs can be habit-forming and can cause confusion, gastrointestinal upset and breathing trouble.

At Seattle's Harborview Medical Centre, psychologists have been using hypnosis to make that pain bearable. They teach severely burned patients how to induce a state of relaxation and comfort. The session includes an instruction - called a post hypnotic suggestion - that cues the patient to feel the same level of comfort days, weeks, or even months later. A simple touch on the shoulder by a nurse, for example, if suggested in the original session, can trigger a trance, enabling a patient to undergo wound care without pain. Hypnosis works in burn pain treatment, say experts, because the pain is intense but short-lived, and patients are aware when it's going to happen.

But surprisingly hypnosis helps people even when they may not know when pain will strike, such as with peptic ulcers. With the help of posthypnotic suggestion, patients in a British study were able to regulate their secretion of gastric acid, so that only 53% experienced further pain, compared with 100% relapse in a control group. Besides burns and peptic ulcers, hypnosis is also helping people get over fractures, migraines, asthma, fibroids and skin disorders; easing patients through childbirth, angioplasty, chemotherapy, breast biopsy - even full-on surgery. All clear indicators that the therapy is gaining increasing legitimacy in mainstream medicine.