Category: Articles

This is because it is so liberating to be free of pain! When you are pain free, it is as if the pain was part of a bad dream you can’t remember much of.

• If you suffer from chronic pain, book an private online or office  session with Dr. Eimer here.
• Health professionals and hypnotherapists can learn how to give the gift of hypnotic pain relief at my live Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner Courses as well as by taking this course online here.
• If you are a professional hypnotherapist, complete our course, and return to your hypnotherapy practice prepared to teach client’s suffering in pain how to transform their daydreams of less pain into waking reality.

Some people are more complicated than others. When a client goes to a hypnotherapist for help and does not get better, it is never the client’s fault. It is that the therapist does not have the requisite skills, knowledge or personality to effectively help the client. Now hypnotherapists can acquire these skills here.

Training for hypnotherapists and health professionals.  We offer intensive one-day, two-day, and three-day fundamental and advanced Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner courses. These courses are designed for professional hypnotherapists, physicians, physician assistants, nurses, chiropractors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, dentists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other mental health professionals. All of these practitioners see patients with severe acute and chronic pain in their respective fields, and are in a position to offer precise hypnotic pain relief if they know what to do and how to do it.

The real world of pain is a lot more complicated and much less black-and-white than the distinctions and generalizations given in textbooks or on this website. Effectively treating any patient or client with hypnosis for pain control demands empathy, compassion, wisdom, knowledge, technical know-how, experience, interest, good intentions, good training, and a competent intake evaluation. It also requires a thorough knowledge of hypnosis, good hypnosis training, and adequate knowledge of pain mechanisms, human physiology and neurology, and psychology.

Acute pain requires an appropriate medical or dental work up. If you can confidently and competently explain to a client or patient the cause of the client’s pain, if you know it, and how treating the cause will alleviate the pain, this is likely to reduce the client’s anxiety. However, if the patient’s work-up doesn’t identify a treatable or fixable cause, we must address the patient’s anxiety. It has been said that the fear of pain is often worse than the pain. This is so true, plus fear can make pain worse too.

Chronic pain also requires an appropriate medical or dental work up. However, chronic pain is way more complicated. Living with severe and unrelenting chronic pain makes most people experience some type of depression. And depression makes pain worse. Successful employment of hypnotic techniques for altering pain sensations and distracting the client his/her preoccupations with the pain requires that the client believes that you take him or her seriously and that you agree that the pain is real and NOT all in the client’s head.

FACT. All pain is real. With chronic pain, there is almost always old emotional baggage that needs to be released. Hypnosis practitioners learn how to do this effectively in our courses. The problem of controlling chronic pain is compounded when a patient is diagnosed with a medical condition that isn’t going to go away. Patients with chronic or debilitating medical conditions associated with persistent pain face the challenge of figuring out how to get along with their pain and somehow make peace with it.

It is the Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner’s job to help patients with pain to accept their condition medically and accept responsibility for what they do about it.  

It is the Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner’s job to help patients with pain build ego strength, self-confidence, self-love, find faith, develop curiosity, and mobilize courage in order to be able to learn new pain coping skills.

Emerging girl from trance and debriefing with her about her feelings and attitude about getting her medical school applications. She stated that she was now eager to get them done.

This is a video of Dr. Eimer doing a rapid induction with a girl in the dog park. She agreed to videotape me on my iPhone doing a pitch for a class, and in return I hypnotized her to help her change her attitude about working on her applications for medical school. Up until today, she was procrastinating and unable to get them done.

It’s time to give back now! Please watch this video. See you at HTL2019 at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in just a week on August 13th through the 21st. Also, consider taking my 2-day practitioner workshop on Pain Control Hypnosis on Aug 13-14.

Hypnosis has been around for thousands of years, dating back to the ancient Egyptian and Greek sleep temples, in the forms of faith healing and the directed use of the imagination.

The term “Mesmerism”, which means to entrance or induce trance, came from the work of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician who lived in 18th century Europe. He was discredited by a commission headed by none other than Ben Franklin in the 1780’s. Franklin concluded that the powerful effects of Mesmerism on Dr. Mesmer’s followers were real, but that Dr. Mesmer himself was a huckster because at that time in history, there was no credible scientific support for Dr. Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism”. Franklin attributed the very real effectiveness of “Mesmerism” to the directed use of the imagination! 

Years later, in the 1840’s, a Scottish physician named Dr. James Braid coined the term “hypnosis” and ushered in the modern era of medical hypnosis. Braid’s style of hypnosis as the sole form of surgical anesthesia was pioneered by a British surgeon named Dr. James Esdaile in India who performed major surgeries on thousands of cases with marked reductions in surgery mortalities. Sigmund Freud’s physician mentors such as Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, a noted French neurologist of the day, used James Braid’s style of hypnosis successfully in treating various neuropsychological syndromes with psychological causes. Dr. Freud tried hypnosis with his neurotic patients but he soon abandoned it due to his fears that he would not be able to control the so-called “erotic transference” after he hypnotized his female patients. Freud was a brilliant doctor and theorist, but a poor hypnotist and he was paranoid.

This paved the way for Dr. Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis and his psychosexual theories of neurosis. Dr. Braid’s and Dr. Mesmer’s forms of clinical hypnosis lost popularity in medical circles to psychoanalysis and free association, itself a form of trancework. Classical hypnosis became more popular at the turn of the 19^th century in the world of stage hypnosis. However, psychologists as laboratory researchers at ivory tower universities continued to investigate hypnotic phenomena.  

Milton Erickson, MD, an innovative psychiatrist, pioneered new creative approaches to clinical hypnosis with medical and psychiatric patients. Erickson might rightfully be considered the founding father of modern medical hypnosis and he co-founded the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH) in the 50’s. David Cheek, MD, an innovative Ob-Gyn, was Erickson’s contemporary, and he along with “lay hypnotist” Leslie LeCron developed unique approaches to hypnoanalysis using ideomotor techniques.

Richard Bandler and Jon Grinder were two of MHE’s many brilliant students and they invented NLP based on their conceptualization of the “deep structure” of Erickson’s work.  

In the latter half of the 20^th century through the first decade of the 21^st century, medical hypnosis societies such as ASCH and academic psychological hypnosis societies such as the Society for Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis (SCEH) refused to associate with or admit as members hypnosis practitioners whom they pejoratively labeled as “lay hypnotists”. At least medical psychoanalytic societies admitted non-physicians as members whom they called “lay analysts”. Lay analysts could take classes, teach, and get certified. Quite to the contrary, professional members of ASCH and SCEH were sanctioned if they were caught studying with or teaching with so-called “lay hypnotists. As a result of this ignorance, progress was stifled in the evolution of hypnosis because the cross fertilization of ideas was inhibited.

Yours truly stopped renewing his ASCH membership despite having been an elected fellow of ASCH.  He stopped renewing his SCEH membership too, and joined the International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapy Association (IMDHA), where he earned fellowship, and Hypnothoughts. 

Hypnothoughts Live has succeeded in bringing together from around the world the most brilliant minds in hypnosis. The result has been the creation of a great online forum on Facebook,   https://www.facebook.com/groups/HypnoThoughts/ and the annual Hypnothoughts Live (HTL) conference in Las Vegas, which is by far the best continuing education event I have ever attended.

I am 100% dedicated to supporting the growth of the HTL enterprise because the founders, Scott Sandland and Richard Clark are 100% dedicated to fostering the evolution of the science and practice of hypnosis in the 21^st century, and they are fair minded, honest, and they are practicing hypnotherapists who work in the trenches just like me. 

My area of special expertise is Pain Control Hypnosis by virtue of my fortuitous clinical experiences over a period of more than 30 years in providing medical and psychiatric patients with hypnotic pain relief. Recently, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder called Polymyalgia Rheumatica or PMR. This condition untreated is severely disabling. With precipitously acute onset, it hits like a ton of bricks. You wake up one morning feeling as if you were beaten up by three WWE wrestlers. I have struggled with chronic back and leg pain for years following a motor vehicle accident in 1993 that left me with serious injuries. I developed Fibromyalgia. Self-hypnosis as I learned it from a hypnotist whom I saw early on worked for me. Then I added my own modifications. But this PMR was like a real test from God. I had to be put on Prednisone which is the first line treatment for PMR. Untreated all of your major joints lock up in severe pain. But you cannot remain on steroids for a long time without suffering the breakdown of your body. So, now I have been forced to walk the walk about which I have written books and talked. Good luck to me! I’ll keep you posted in my Pain Control Blog.

I will keep everyone posted. I will continue to help as many suffering individuals as I can with my brand of Pain Control Hypnosis. See www.PainControlHypnosis.com. I will learn from every person I work with and every challenge that I personally face in coping with my own PMR. And I will treat anyone who has been verifiably medically diagnosed with PMR for free with Pain Control Hypnosis.

I am teaching my 2-day intensive Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioner course this August at HTL2019 in Las Vegas, and I will be teaching this PCHP course all over the country this coming year.

We train hypnotherapists to become Certified Pain Control Hypnosis Practitioners (PCHPs).

Communicates to the client that he/she is aware that the pain feels like something in the client’s body has been, or is being damaged, and that the pain feels like a threat to the client’s functionality and health.

Finds out whether the client has been feeling anxious, fearful, angry or depressed, and the basis for any of these negative feeling states. Explains how these emotional states affect pain levels and why these persistent feelings must be addressed.