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Hypnosis Works
The power of trance can no longer be disputed, a psychiatrist at Stanford University says. Now we just have to use it

By Michael Abrams
Photography by Dan Winters
DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 11 | November 2004 | Mind & Brain

The patient is 80 years old. She is lying under the bright lights of an operating room at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where radiologist Elvira Lang is about to thread a catheter through her arteries. The tiny tube will work its way to one of the woman’s kidneys, where it will block the organ’s blood supply. A surgeon is scheduled to remove the kidney the next day. Embolizing the kidney will help keep the operation simple, safe, and tidy. But the woman is running a fever, and her kidney may be infected. Because she ate earlier in the day, she can’t be given a sedative. What should have been a routine procedure has become an ordeal. “This is your safe and pleasant place to be,” one of Lang’s associates reads from a laminated card. “You can use it in a sense to play a trick on the doctors. Your body has to be here, but you don’t.”