Early in my career as a biomedical engineer, designing and building medical diagnostic and therapeutic instruments, I came across this amazing thing called the placebo effect.

I was astounded to find out how strong this effect was, often as high as 50% of the efficacy of many drug and device therapies. The power of suggestion, the placebo, has been studied copiously over the last hundred years: scientists measure it, document it, compare it to "real" therapies and no therapy, and unequivocally acknowledge its effectiveness. What is most astonishing, however, is that this great power to influence disease recovery is then fully discarded when it comes to helping the patient in clinical practice! And even worse, a doctor's well-intentioned prognosis can easily form an extremely effective negative suggestion that can make matters worse.

Of course you cannot patent or license someone's own healing capacity, so there is no economic incentive for the medical system to promote the power of suggestion and self-healing.

Even so, I became enamored with understanding the mechanism of the placebo effect and how this might actually be used intentionally to empower the patient with his or her own healing. After all, the clinician may have fooled the patient with his sham treatment, but it was the patient herself that actually, unconsciously performed the healing, whether it was from ulcers, asthma, cancer or depression. To be sure, the success was not merely "in the head" either: physical and measurable effects are always documented.

I found that the secret to using this powerful mechanism, the power of suggestion, lied in the poorly understood realms of consciousness, as it applies to human wellness and performance. I became a Clinical Hypnotist in the late 1980s as this seemed to be the most practical and direct application of this self-healing modality. In studying and applying various mind-body techniques that initiate the body's own creative energies, which often lie dormant in the subconscious, I found I could teach someone how to activate this powerful mechanism on their own. This forms the basis of much of my work, whether it is helping individuals master stress, recover from illness, enhance performance, succeed in a venture, or discover their life meaning through alchemical hypnosis.

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