Curing the Incurable

Hypnosis is the only known cure for the congenital problem of fishskin disease. There is no medical solution for this disease. So if hypnosis can lead to even a partial healing it must be a very powerful process. Many practitioners of hypnosis now believe that hypnosis allows a special access to bodily change processes that is not normally possible.

Let's look at the fishskin study. In a 1952 issue of the Lancet , the British medical journal, Dr. Mason described his treatment of a young patient who seemed at first to be a very bad case of warts (Mason, A. A. (August 23rd, 1952). About 90% of the patient's body (except his chest, neck and face) was covered with an unsightly, lumpy, raised growth. The skin felt as tough as a fingernail and tended to crack with normal movement, leading to the constant presence of oozing blood stained serum. As a result, there was very unpleasant smell around the young man. You can imagine how uncomfortable his life was, since normal movement was severely limited because of the inflexibility of his tough skin. He didn't look very good either.

Mason was introduced to the patient when he was helping out with a skin graft operation that was not going very well. He thought he was looking at a case of warts and he knew that hypnosis could often be an effective treatment for warts. So he commented to the surgeon that hypnosis might be the thing to try. The surgeon gave him a funny look but said o.k., why don't you try it. At the first treatment session in the hospital ward, Mason asked the boy to relax, and then suggested that the left arm would clear and return to normal in a few days time. He touched the parts of young man's shoulder to show where this would happen. When he returned to see the patient again 5 days later, the thick horny skin had just flaked off. The pink flesh now visible looked normal.

With further treatment, eventually most of the skin became soft and normal again. The treatment effect was about what Mason had expected. However, when he showed the initial result to the surgeon, his jaw dropped and he told Mason to go off to the library to read up on the disease called Icthyosiform Erythrodermia of Brocq. This is a congenital disease. Patients with this problem lack oil-producing glands in the skin, so that instead of sloughing off from time to time, layers of skin build up one on top of the other, creating the symptoms that Mason had treated. The surgeon was so impressed with the hypnotic treatment he arranged for himself and Mason to give a talk about the case at the highly respected Royal Society.

Mason later pointed out that had he realised exactly what he had been dealing with, a congenital skin disease, he would never have tried hypnosis, because it seems so unlikely that the mind could cure a genetic physical problem for which medicine had no solution. In a later interview he said it was as likely that hypnosis could do anything for this condition as that it could cure a club foot.

There have been several other cases described in the Lancet since Mason's original study. Not all have had the same degree of success, but where healing was more limited there was often evidence of a psychological barrier to explain the lack of effect. Even so, since there is no medical treatment for the condition, all of these studies stand as strong testimony to the potential power of psychological factors in bodily healing.

One of the really fascinating aspects of these cases is that the patients did not have to understand how the healing effect could be achieved for healing to occur. Mason's case was a young man of 16 years, who had never heard of fishskin disease. Even more fascinating, Mason didn't know what the disease was either at the beginning. He thought he was treating the young man for a terrible case of warts.

In my opinion the most likely factor leading to improvement in such cases is the use of the imagination. The patient's imagining of body healing. But whatever the explanation, it is pretty clear that if healing change is possible in cases of congenital health problems, there would seem to be almost no limit on what might be achieved.

While treatment for fishskin disease is one of the most spectacular successes reported for hypnosis, there seem to be many other possibilities for self healing and change opened up through the use of hypnosis. For instance, reducing the damage from serious burns, removal of warts, modification or elimination of allergy responses, breast enlargement, or the elimination of profound levels of acute and chronic pain.