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Minding the Gap: How Post Hypnotic Suggestion Maintains the World of Osteoarthritis - Taking Steps to Dehypnotize the Body for Recovery and Restoration of Joint Function

Bernard Plansky, MD, FAAFP

Osteoarthritis research findings are multidisciplinary. Existing lines of inquiry suggest that known and unknown factors serve to induce joint changes leading to chronic inflammation. A whole body integrated defensive response to injury occurs which, though intending to protect the joint, becomes chronic, creating conditions that enable inflammation and the pain of injury to continue and progress. Although long removed from the times of flexible mobility within a properly aligned structure, the body's osteoarthritic joints do not become immobile, but rather continue to limp from event to event. Recent findings suggest osteoarthritis is associated with an induction of a cartilage phenotype resembling incomplete endochondral ossification. Repetitive post hypnotic suggestions serve to maintain and deepen the induction of osteoarthritis thereby sealing in the injury to the joint. Under this isolating influence, the response to injury is unable to rejoin a movement that would lead to joint recovery and restoration. It is through the study of this very gap that new restorative learning can flow in. Through the study how hypnosis maintains the world of osteoarthritis, participants will learn how to employ practices of attention that have a dehypnotizing effect upon the body. Certain exercises, when consciously engaged, integratively support conditions opposite to those maintaining osteoarthritis and slowly support the body's finding functional alignment. Under their influence, osteoarthritic cartilage can shift to a more functional phenotype. Participants will learn how, with conscious practice and perseverance, factors which create and maintain the world of osteoarthritis can be reconciled leading to joint recovery and restoration.

Attendees will learn how hypnosis serves to create and maintain the world of osteoarthritis. The neurobiology of osteoarthritis will be presented within this context. Rather than utilizing hypnosis to treat the results of the condition, participants will learn how to dehypnotize the body - awakening it from its hypnotic sleep and allowing the impression of its condition to be seen. Milton Erickson described that letting the "unconscious mind take a look, a mental look at what's going on is sufficient. In those mental looks and understandings, you learn a great deal more than you do by conscious effort. And you should use your mind at the unconscious level, even while you are using it at the conscious level." (My Voice Will Go With You – The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson, p. 64). The double binds that seal in the body's response to injury and prevent the body from fixing itself will be reviewed. Practical application of Eternal Spring Tai Chi, a hybrid of tai chi and its sister discipline nei kung, will be taught within this context. The emergence of a new experiential story of osteoarthritis will change how attendees conceptualize and address both osteoarthritis and other chronic medical conditions. Attendees will be able to invite patients into this story which allows the body, at its own pace and sequence, to fix itself with the symptom now serving as a reminding factor to respond with the necessary action for maintaining the more healthy alignment.