Medical Hypnotism Certification

This blog posting is a bit of an ad; I'm teaching the National Guild of Hypnotists Complementary Medical Hypnotism Certification program in Decatur, Illinois, November 7th and 8th. I wrote this certification curriculum and it's something I'm really proud of. I put a lot of my original research and work into it, and it teaches people the core techniques of what I do in my practice.

If you want to know more about the upcoming class, follow this link http://www.mitchellinstitute.com/upcoming.htm

All this said, there are other good training programs available in the hypnosis community as well, and I've got a short list of those that I recommend to people who ask. I maintain that list because there are some programs that I regard as disasters, and I do what I can to steer people away from them.

My practice has a strong emphasis on medical work, and if you are reading this blog you probably know that. I work in conjunction with two prominent Wellness Centers and three Chicago-area hospitals: The University of Chicago Medical Center, Little Company of Mary Hospital and La Grange Memorial Hospital. Hospitals are supportive of my work because they know me after twenty years of practice, and I do get results.

These days the use of hypnotism as a tool in medical care is widely accepted. But it was not always that way. When I began to do this work I was regarded with a lot of suspicion, and it took much work before the mainstream medical community started to take me seriously. Hypnotists who are training now don't have the history, and therefore don't realize how bad the state of medical hypnotic training used to be.

When I began my career the most popular trainer in "medical hypnotism" was a retired physician who believed that all medical problems were caused by evil spirits, and she taught classes in how to exorcise them.

Seriously. You can't make this stuff up.

She also believed that if the exorcism didn't work, the medical problem was caused by a past-life issue, and she taught classes in how to fix that too.

The second most popular instructor was a guy who believed that all medical problems were caused by childhood trauma from unloving parents, and you could cure diseases by regressing people to childhood and reprogramming their memories. He passionately proclaimed that one could "cure" all disease in this way.

I even once sat through a presentation by the owner of an unaccredited "Ph.D." school in Louisiana where he and his wife claimed to regularly walk through the "cancer ward" of their local hospital and hypnotize people, claiming to cure cancer with this sort of informal single-session hypnotism. For some reason he didn't mention, the local press ignored this regular production of "miracle" cures.

Hint: modern hospitals do not have "cancer wards." People living with cancer are mixed into the general hospital population not segregated into discrete wards. Their claim was about as authentic as the "Ph.D." in Hypnotherapy they printed on the laser printer they installed in the double-wide trailer they lived in.

Trust me. The state of medical hypnotism training was once really, really bad. That's why the leadership of the Guild, once they confirmed I actually did have the support of the medical community, asked me to create a curriculum that wouldn't cause Consulting Hypnotists to be laughed at. Since then I'm pleased that the general state of training has improved. The result has been more openness to hypnotism by the medical community and more work for us all.