Comfort Talk® founder and award-winning interventional radiologist Dr. Elvira Lang is a former Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School, and a pioneer and leading world expert in the use of hypnosis during medical procedures. In fact, she literally “wrote the book” on the subject. Patient Sedation Without Medication draws on Dr. Lang’s nearly two decades of field experience serving thousands of patients.
She has held faculty positions at the University of Heidelberg, Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and Harvard Medical School. With a substantive government-funded research program she demonstrated in three large-scale prospective randomized studies with more than 700 patients that hypnosis on the procedure table reduces pain, anxiety, drug use, and complications. This work provided much of the evidence-based foundation for widespread acceptance of procedural hypnosis.
In more than 150 research papers and chapters, Dr. Lang has presented and analyzed medical procedures and interactions with healthcare professionals as well as the effects of patients’ age and disposition on outcomes. She has developed and rigorously tested training in methods of advanced rapport skills and hypnoidal language for busy healthcare professionals who have no extra time to spare.
This experience culminated in the creation of Comfort Talk®. She oversaw further multicenter trials on the training of MRI teams in Comfort Talk® encompassing >125,000 patient visits which yielded impressive improvements in patients’ satisfaction and ability to complete examinations at the participant sites.
She is working with Toronto Hospital for Sick Children on a clinical trial on improving the perioperative and postoperative experience surrounding cardiac interventions.
Her research work has been acknowledged with the Ernest R. Hilgard Award for Scientific Excellence for a Lifetime of Published Experimental Work.
Through her publications and efforts as Past President of the New England Society of Clinical Hypnosis and the Society of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis she promoted the training in procedure hypnosis for nurses and licensed healthcare professionals within the scope of their practice.
After having co-authored the book “Patient Sedation Without Medication” for medical personnel she now published “Managing Your Medical Experience,” a book for patients’ use. She has dedicated her career to improving the experience of patients having medical procedures. Her vision is that one day any patient who enters a hospital or doctor’s office will be able to receive good communication for a better experience and a better outcome.
To address the wide-spread distress many are feeling with the COVID pandemic, she made the Comfort Talk® Pro App available for free in the Apple and Google Play stores.