Steven Gurgevich - Hypnosis House Call: A Complete Course in Mind-Body Healing

Hypnosis House Call

A Complete Course in
Mind-Body Healing

Dr. Steven Gurgevich
Foreword by Andrew Weil, MD

Hypnosis House Call should not be used as a substitute for your ongoing or current medical and/or psychological therapies. If you are being treated for a mental disorder or you are in counseling, you should consult your therapist to gain professional advice about your use of self-hypnosis and this book and DVD.

The author and publisher specifically disclaim any responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, that is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book and DVD.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gurgevich, Steven.
Hypnosis house call: a complete course in mind-body healing/Steven Gurgevich.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4027-7747-9
1. Hypnotism--Therapeutic use. 2. Autogenic training. 3. Mind and body. I. Title.

RC499.A8G87 2010
615.8 5122--dc22
2010012316

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2011 by Dr. Steven Gurgevich
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Contents

by Andrew Weil, MD

Y ou are in for a treat. This book and DVD bring mind-body medicine directly to you. When Steve Gurgevich and I were growing up, doctors commonly made house calls. When you think of a house call, you dont picture the doctor examining your medical chart while you sit on a sterile, paper-covered exam table. For those who remember them, house calls centered on a warm and compassionate relationship with a trusted physician who knew and treated all the members of the family. Home visits allowed the doctor to learn a great deal about patients, their relationships, and their lifestyles. As you will read in the many case studies presented in this book, this information can help stimulate the healing process.

Steve Gurgevich is a longtime friend and colleague of mine who has specialized in mind-body medicine and clinical hypnosis for almost four decades. And, yes, he still makes house calls. Hypnosis House Call provides you with an opportunity to learn and experience medical hypnosis from a master.

I have been an advocate of mind-body medicine during my entire professional career, and I still practice and study its many forms. At the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, which I direct, mind-body medicine is a core subject taught to all the physicians, nurse-practitioners, medical students, and residents we train. Even though much of Western medicine still thinks of mind-body methods, including hypnosis, as merely complementary or an alternative to real medicine, there are now over fifty years of impressive studies that validate their central role in healing.

The new sophisticated imaging technology of positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imagery (f-MRI) scans let us see the brains activity at specific regions, correlating with specific mental states and while the patient is engaged in mind-body therapies. Studies clearly show that hypnosis is not all in ones head or limited to imagination and suggestion. These newer imaging technologies show the body and mind as inseparable, sharing in all experiences, both physical and mental. I hope they will help expand our understanding of health to include body, mind, and spirit. The present materialistic view that attributes physical symptoms only to physical causes severely limits our understanding of disease and our ability to treat it. Mind-body medicine concerns the nonphysical causation of changes in the body. It takes advantage of the unitary nature of mind-body to activate healing in safe, effective, and cost-effective ways, now greatly underutilized in conventional practice.

Mind-body approaches have been used throughout history.

This books appendix includes a concise history of hypnosis in medicine from ancient Greece to the modern day. Happily, the last half-century has seen an evolution of more sophisticated mind-body therapies, which are effective, inexpensive, time-efficient, and enjoyableand without the risks associated with pharmaceutical drugs.

Hypnosis House Call is not about the research studies and is not an argument in favor of mind-body medicine. Dr. Gurgevich, or Dr. G, as his patients call him, produced this book and DVD to share with you the benefit of learning and experiencing hypnosis for yourself. He uses a great many actual patient cases to illustrate and to enlighten the reader in much the same manner that he works with his patients. In his highly accessible house-call style, he dispels the myths and misconceptions and explains what hypnosis really is and how you can use it for healing. Readers will learn methods to induce hypnosis and discover their innate ability to experience it. Therapeutic strategies and techniques are explained in the case histories, including those where hypnosis was of limited benefit.

I know that the stories will open your eyes and mind to the powerful reality of the mind-body connection. Im personally familiar with some of the cases, as they were patients seen in our integrative medicine clinicteaching cases for the physicians in our fellowship training program. Others concern patients I referred to Dr. G. In fact, he has made house calls to my own home.

When my former wife, Sabine, was pregnant with our daughter, I asked Steve to do a session with her in the interest of ensuring a timely, quick, and uncomplicated birth. We were worried, because three weeks before her due date, the baby was still in a posterior presentation. Sabines previous baby had also been posterior, which caused a long and painful labor. Steve arrived at our house in the late afternoon. During a one-hour session with comfy pillows on the living room carpet, he guided Sabine into a relaxed state of inner absorption and encouraged her to talk with the baby, asking it to turn around. He reminded mother and baby to begin enjoying their mother/daughter relationship now. And he offered posthypnotic suggestions for each of them to do what was needed for an easy labor and birth. Sabine was highly motivated, trusting, with a strong belief in the mind-body connectionan excellent hypnotic subject. After Steve guided her out of her reverie, she looked supremely relaxed. He left, and we went about making dinner. We were in the kitchen when, without warning, she bent over, clutching her belly.