Summer 2009

How many fingers am I holding up?
Moulton, Donalee
Published: Medical Post : 06-02-2006

Halifax’s Dr. Donald Corey Brown has used hypnosis - ‘the most under-utilized modality of therapy’ - for more than 40 years to successfully help patients quit smoking, suffer less discomfort during childbirth and deal with chronic pain and illness

There is a  lot of myth-conception about hypnosis. No one knows this better than Dr. Donald Corey Brown, who has used this technique to treat patients for more than 40 years. Indeed, his entire practice today is devoted to helping patients help themselves through hypnosis.

The first myth-conception this family physician would like to dispel is the issue of control. The hypnotized individual, he says, is always in control.

“Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness,” he explains. “(The patient) is learning necessary information to use it as a modality of therapy.”

Dr. Brown first used the technique in 1963 on an obstetrics patient-at her request. The woman had had a painful first labour. She didn’t want to repeat the experience. Thanks to hypnosis, she didn’t have to.

First though, Dr. Brown had to learn the technique. It was not something he had been taught in medical school. So the Nova Scotia native went looking for help. “There were 18 doctors at the hospital,” he remembers, “and none of us knew.”

To his surprise, Dr. Brown discovered that a psychiatrist in the town where he was living, Amherst, N.S., was using hypnosis. Later he travelled to Halifax to meet with the only obstetrician in the province at that time who was using the technique with patients.

His patient had such a good delivery that Dr. Brown began offering the option to other pregnant women. Fifty per cent, he says, took him up on the offer. Over time he noticed that women who were hypnotized during labour did not produce an infant with colic. They had shorter labour times and 60% required no drugs. Less support was needed from nursing staff.

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