by Anne Spencer, Ph.D.

One of the most unexpected events in my life was to be doing a regression for weight reduction and find myself involved in an exorcism.

It happened this way. I was asked to work with a national author and speaker who had a weight problem. We'll call her Rose. I first met rose via telephone as I had written her to say how much her book had helped me understand myself and some of my clients. Rose called to thank me and said she would be in my city a few months hence. We met for lunch and the friendship began.

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We just received this from Dan Cleary (via Anne Spencer, Ph.D.). Henry Leo Bolduc, a well respected hypnotherapist recently had a accident while cutting wood on his farm in Virginia. Please join us with the rest of the hypnotherapy and mind/body community showing support for Henry and his wife Joan. Below is the text of the e-mail received from Dan and Anne.

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Henry and his wife Joanie, live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, near a crossroads called Wytheville. They live out in the backside of nowhere and that is where Henry was on March 5th, when there was a terrible accident. Henry was home alone and out on the property cutting fire wood with a chain saw. There was a slip, a misstep and the saw came down on Henry's left arm, just above the wrist, nearly severing his hand from his arm. The chain cut through skin, muscles, bone and tissue.

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Chaotic transitions emerge in a wide variety of cognitive phenomena and may possibly be linked to specific changes during development of mental disorders. There are several hypotheses that link the dissociation to critical chaotic shifts with the resulting self-organization of behavioral patterns during critical periods. In 2 patients, hypnotic revivification of dissociated trauma along with measurement of bilateral electrodermal activity (EDA) for therapeutic and research purposes was performed. Nonlinear data analysis of EDA records shows a difference between degree of chaos in hypnotic relaxed state before revivification of the trauma and dissociated state after reliving the traumatic memory. Results suggest that the dissociated state after revivification of the trauma is significantly more chaotic than the state during the hypnotic relaxation before the event. Findings of this study suggest a possible role of neural chaos in the processing of the dissociated traumatic memory during hypnotic revivification.

Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2007 Oct;55(4):435-56. Bob P. Department of Psychiatry, 1st Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. petrbob@netscape.net

Hypnotically assisted treatments have been used to reduce stress, improve gastrointestinal motility, strengthen immune function, and potentially reduce inflammation. Such treatments may also help reduce disease flares and improve quality of life in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). The authors report the results of a case series of 8 white female patients with inactive IBD. All participants initiated and completed treatment, supporting the general acceptability of hypnotically assisted treatment among IBD patients. There was a significant improvement in IBD-quality of life scores for the group posttreatment, t(7) = -3.38, p = .01, with a mean improvement in quality of life of 29 points with significant changes in all 4 subscales. No negative effects of treatment were found.

Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2007 Oct;55(4):457-66. Keefer L, Keshavarzian A. Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois, USA. laurie.keefer@northwestern.edu