Beating Pain With Brain Power by Dr. Elvira Lang at the Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School feature on Dr. Lang and Comfort Talk®.

 

Here is a transcript of the video:

My work with Comfort Talk® which is the name of my company in using hypnotic techniques for helping patients came all about when I was at Stanford and at the VA in Palo Alto. There was this very scared young Vietnam Veteran who one couldn’t even get on the table and that’s when I saw the first time how a quick hypnotic intervention could make a difference. And so, I built a research program around that and we were able to conduct very large scale clinical trials and now also showing that there is a very big economic incentive to train medical teams in Comfort Talk®.

One of my big passions right now is the opioid crisis, all efforts now are directed at the back end, treating either addiction or limiting prescriptions. but our research showed that if you help patents at the time in the procedure how to cope with pain while they still have a chance to get the drugs to practice that while you guide them, it changes the way they process pain.

If you look at the uses of hypnotic interventions, I think there are many applications for patients who are in a stressful situation. The key issue is that pretty much all hypnosis is self-hypnosis, and that one understands that it is guiding people to discover their own internal coping skills and what works best for them.