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Research has repeatedly shown that hypnosis works as an anaesthetic and can help heal certain conditions.

The effects of hypnosis are similar to the placebo effect, accessing the mind's self-regulating abilities.

This suggests that mind has a regulating effect on the body and cannot just be a product of brain activity.

Consciousness may be more fundamental and universal, rather than reducible to physical properties.

In India during the 1840s, a Scottish doctor named James Esdaile was frequently visited by men suffering from enormous tumours in the scrotum, caused by mosquito bites. The operation to remove the tumours was so painful that men would often postpone it for years.

Esdaile had learned about hypnotism (or mesmerism, as it was usually referred to then) and decided to try the technique as a way of relaxing patients in collaboration with local Hindu and Muslim mesmerisers. To his surprise, he found that not only did the patients feel relaxed, but they also felt no pain during operations. Esdaile also noted that patients didn’t seem to display physiological signs of pain, such as changes to pulse rate and pupil size.

Since then, evidence has accumulated showing that hypnosis can have an analgesic effect. A 2020 meta-analysis of 45 trials of the use of hypnosis for clinical pain found that 73 percent of hypnotised people experienced less pain than control groups (who didn't have any pain interventions).

Research over the past 20 years at the Integrative Medicine Program at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has found that patients who received a combination of a........

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