Session #34: Scot Giles, Medical Hypnosis, and the Future

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Let’s get medical. This is the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast, session number 34, part one with Scott Giles. Welcome to the Work Smart Hypnosis Podcast with Jason Lynette, your professional resource for hypnosis training and outstanding business success. Here’s your host, Jason Lynette. Welcome back, and it’s so good to have you here with me right now, and also so good to have you here.

This, uh, conversation I just had with Scott Giles up in Illinois. Uh, I wanna thank everybody, especially for the feedback we’ve received on last week’s session, session number 33 with Raha Night. So wonderful to see that massive response to a program that I did with someone that most of you have not heard.

You know, you would think it’d be the game of get the biggest names out there and that increase creases, the viewership, the listening ship, yet wonderful to see the opposite. Someone just like you who’s out there doing great work, making stuff happen, and admittedly just not making excuses for it. So, uh, definitely gonna be reaching out to several other friends, several other people as well, um, to mix in the.

The, the common folk like you and I, the people out there that we have not yet heard of. Let’s phrase it that way. Uh, transitioning over to someone that I’m sure most of you have heard of, uh, Scott Giles is once again based up in Illinois and specifically here, we just got to talking and we’re gonna split this up as, uh, Two part session.

Now I’m gonna play with something new. I’ve actually got several podcast recordings all put together, and, uh, we’re gonna start to mix them up. So part two of this is actually all about the ethics of our profession and all the research that’s out there in terms of where we’re going next. And I’m gonna delay that a little bit just to mix it up.

That’s gonna come to you probably in the. Maybe two, three or four weeks. It’ll come to you soon. Uh, but the program today I wanna share with you is all about the wonderful work that Scott Giles is doing up there, specifically working with cancer patients. And what I want you to take special note of here too, is the conversation that he and I have about really the future of our profession, transitioning more to a technology based digital access.

Ability to reach out to clientele that physically cannot come into our office. You know, I’ve heard of people that, um, and I’ve had this too. I’ve had clients I’ve worked with remotely because they were out of the country and they wanted to work with me. Yet look at the specific challenges that Scott runs into with people.

Uh, are going through cancer treatments and to ask them to leave their treatments, leave their home and come into an office, it may just not be physically possible or even appropriate. So I think there’s a lot of great information that I hope a lot of you take notice of in this program. Let me give you a link over to, uh, his website, cs giles.org.

CS gi, l e s.org. Really easy to track down. I’ll put that into the show notes as well. This is part one. Part two is gonna be coming at you in a couple of weeks, all about ethics. Here we go. Medical, hypnosis, and the future with Scott Giles.

So I’m always interested in asking this question just to kind of kick things off. What is it that got you into hypnosis first? ? Well, when I was 10 years. I saw Orman. Perform his concert of hypnotism on the Art Link letter show, and I was entranced by it. I sent away from my first book on hypnosis, which was advertised to the back of Superman comic books.

Uh, you had this picture of this guy at a tuxedo with lightning bolts coming out of his fingers. And I saved up my quarters for my allowance, and I, I purchased that book. Now, I often think that heists are bored, not made. You get better with training, but you gotta have a basic flare for it. And if you have that flare, it doesn’t take a lot of information to make you really dangerous.

And that’s what happened to me. That book, while the theory in the book was, was silly, the techniques are what we teach in basic hypnosis courses to this day. So I really did hypnotize my grade school classmates to sing the Star Spangled Banner. When the teacher began to erase the Blackboard , I was thrown outta.

Nice. My parents forbade me who have anything further to do with hypnosis, so of course it became my life’s work. I would actually sneak into the adult library, go down to the 100 level stacks of the Dewey Decimal system, which is where the books were for HSIs, and I would get a book and I’d go hide somewhere and I’d read it in the library.

When I went to the University of Chicago, uh, Beville Lobar Theological School at the University of Chicago for my doctoral degree, had the chance to actually do some coursework in hyp Dosis and found I really liked it. And then after graduation, I did a two year post-doctoral training program with a practice associated with Rush Medical Center.

And, uh, so that was my journey into, uh, professional hepatism. Subsequently, after that two year postdoc, I did a trading course at Mine Site Institute, which is a guild school or was a guild school in uh, Indiana. And that’s how I got. I became part of the Guild certification program. Excellent, Excellent. So then most of your focus these days though, is in this complimentary medicine arena, correct?

Uh, yeah. I’ll do other things cause you don’t wanna go stale as a practitioner, but the bulk of my practice focuses on issues of health and wellbeing, putting people in touch with their own natural healing power. I probably have a strong specialization into cancer. It’s what I’m best known for. Although I do work with other conditions as.

Got it. Got it. And sort of taking things back a little bit, would you say that was a niche that found you or a niche that you went after? Oh, it’s a niche that found me. When I was doing that two year post doc program, I was a parish minister. I was a senior pastor at the uh, church in Oak Park of National Landmark Building by Frank Lloyd Wright, Unity Temple.

And I had nine women in the congregation who had breast cancer. They asked if I would work with them hypnotically to help them overcome the side effects of their chemotherapy. These days, the chemotherapy we use is much more sophisticated than it was back then, so I did work with them. There was virtually no literature on how to do this.

It was making it up as I went along. But all nine women did much better than anyone thought that they would do, where upon their doctors began to wanna send other patients. Pretty soon. That just took over my entire career. And then in 1990, I made the jump from Parish Ministry into what I do now, which is called community Ministry, working with the wider community and, uh, opened up my practice.

Excellent. And in terms of that split these days, uh, I know you’re actually in residence at a hospital certain days of the week, correct? Correct. Well, my research program is based at Lag Beach Memorial Hospital in LaGrange, Illinois. And we’ve been there since 1991. So it’s, yeah, going at 24 years now.

That’s meets every single week. I also do a monthly pre hypnosis program for anyone who wants to sign up for it, provided they have cancer or are caretaker for someone who has cancer, and that’s that little company of Mary Hospital. I do another version of that program online and another version of that program with Wellness House, which is a big cancer support center here in the Midwest.

Yeah. What I’d be curious to ask, and this is something that, uh, has come up in previous sessions here, just, uh, different opinions, different thoughts on this, but I know that you make use of quite a bit of technology actually during your sessions and then doing a lot of work virtually online as well. Do you feel.

And I know there’s differing opinions on this. Do you feel it kind of changes the aspect of the work, or would you say it enhances the work? Just what are your thoughts on this? More of a digital access on demand style in which we’re able to work with people remotely. Yeah. Well, specifically on the, on the working remotely, I find online sessions to be completely effective.

I really prefer to be doing it using a video, uh, conferencing software because I’m a little, I’m hard of hearing myself, and so it helps me to be able to see my. Rather than just have to go by the audio channel alone, but I, I, I’ve been able to detect no decrease in the effectiveness of the hypnosis working virtually versus working here in the office.

The only tradeoff is when I have a client here in the office, I do attach them to biofeedback equipment. So as the hypnosis progresses, I see instantly what’s working and what’s. I can’t do that over a, a video channel, so I don’t have that feedback. I have to use observation and feedback from the client to be able to determine.

But other than that, the work is completely effective. Yeah, I, I’d agree with you on that was something that I, I originally started out thinking it’s not gonna be as effective, it’s not gonna be as workable and finding many, many times in certain situations. I mean, I, well, I’m in the northern Virginia, DC area, and sometimes the call would come in and just the, I tried to leave, but the traffic was so horrible.

and the trade off of, well, we can do it this way. I, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this cuz the, the reason that was drilled into me early on about why you should perhaps never do it was that thought of the spontaneous a reaction, which the more that I pull people on that conversation, it’s a thing that absolutely can happen.

But I was finding more and more that. The people who I’d interact with that had worked with people either in stage or in groups or in solo sessions, upwards of 10,000 plus people in front of them could still only count like one or two times where they’d run into that. Yeah, I’ve never had an ag reaction.

That wasn’t uh, planned. Yes, People, uh, I think are capable of self-regulating and if they know that they’re on a virtual channel, not in person, they will take the necessary steps to keep themselves safe when they’re having their hypnotic experience and, uh, they don’t lose control. Now I don’t follow the element style of hypnosis, so I’m not as dependent on regression and to, to cause without reaction as more orthodox element practitioners do.

My uh, theoretical loyalty is to the ericsonian tradition and to the cognitive behavioral methodologies. So, a. Well, I will occasionally do it. It’s not a, a technique that I depend on, so the hypnosis that I do is more subdued and clients simply have no trouble with it. Right. I’d agree with that and the right techniques at the right time.

Of course, being the style, but looking at it from the little phenomenon that. I, I, I, in my classes, I have a little section that I just use to expedite things, which is that I’ve just give a vocabulary list and we cover it in rapid fire. And the joke usually is, it’s only by fault of vocabulary, by fault of alphabetical order that we have to talk a reaction first.

So let’s scare the hell out of everybody here and now let’s jump into class and have some fun. But addressing it. And there’s always that disclaimer that this is something that yes, we talk about. But again, the more I talk to people, the more I pull people. I’m seeing single digits. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of that true spontaneous, the ab reaction induced style, which there’s elements of that, not just in the Elman school, but also in others as well, of bringing up that negative sensation.

If anything, the, you know, the, the control panel, uh, metaphor of bring it up so you can bring it down. That’s just in a lot of nlp. Mm-hmm. . From the perspective of the quote, spontaneous, that was that one thing that was drilled into me as to why we should not be doing these sessions. And, but again, finding the convenience, finding the efficacy.

And also, I think it’s, Well you can speak to this too, the, the ethics in terms of where all this is going. Right? Right. Well, you know, it is always the practitioner’s professional obligation to choose the technique that’s appropriate for the. If you know you’re gonna be over a digital channel working by Skype or whatever, you have an obligation to choose the techniques that are appropriate to that medium.

So like for example, I would try to do an instant induction that way. That’s just simply good practice. What you do has to be who you are and who your client is. So that spaces I see no problem whatsoever working online. I’ve got clients all over the world, even have two in China right now. The only downside to what working internationally is you have to be aware of the time difference.

Yes. Uh, non digging China is 14 hours ahead of us and so that makes scheduling a bit of a problem.

Then again, that’s a good problem to have for you. So I want to kind of take things back a little bit then. I know you were trained originally in a, in a guild based, uh, school, correct? Well, I did train in a guild based school, but actually I had, had already been practicing for some time and a, I trained with, uh, practice here in Chicago that was affiliated with Rush Medical Center.

I did a two year program with them. So then I went to a guild school when I became part of the National Guild of Hypnotist. Yeah, I was actually a hypnotist practicing, you know, park with my congregation members before I was guild certified because I would had come in through a different way. My decision to go into the Guild was because I simply wanted to have colleagues.

And the Guild, I think, is the best hyp organ. Not the others are bad, but the, the Guild is, I think, the best hypnosis organization out there. The easiest one to join, the easiest one to be part of. We had a school that was guild certified just in Indiana, so I could touch up my training and learn the guild method.

And, uh, so that’s what I did and had a, I’ve had a consistently, a very, very good experience. Then of course, uh, I ended up moving into the, onto the advisory board of the Guild on legislative student and governmental concerns issues. But that’s a different story. Yeah, and let’s come back to that in a little bit.

But I’d love to hear, and it’s always interesting, I, I’ve discovered the statement that everyone feels they live in the Bible Belt no matter where they live. That’s where they say it is. And whether it’s this part of Virginia, then again, go to Tennessee, go to anywhere. Everyone’s gonna claim the same phrase and just there’s a rich history of.

People like you, people like I could reference, uh, William Mitchell, late Paul Durban, people that were very active in terms of religion as ministers, as preachers, as different positions as well. Also integrating hypnosis. So I’d ask you this from the perspective of let’s say the new hypnotist that May looking at their area and may have, and perhaps we can label them as self limiting beliefs, may have some perceived challenges.

Uh, In terms of folding hypnosis into an area where they feel religion may be a challenge, I, I’d love to hear from the inside your thoughts on that. Well, it is. It is an issue and I’m part of a fairly liberal denomination. I’m a Unitarian universalist, but even so, there were concerns in the congregation that I was going to now, Do something to them with my mind.

So the best thing to do is to simply address that directly. And I would invite for my pulpit, I would talk about hypnotic experiences I was having or uh, share stories, success stories, that sort of thing. But I was making it clear that this wasn’t my control. And I would sometimes joke that if it were possible for heists to make people do things they didn’t want to.

IUs would be running the world by now. The fact that we’re not running the world shows that you can’t use hyp doses coercive. And that I think was settled it down for most people, but there always were some who were a little, uh, uncomfortable with it in terms of, uh, more fundamentalist or evangelical denomination.

So I’m here in Wheaton. I got Wheaton College, one of the largest Christian colleges in the nation, right in my backyard. I live in the academic section so that my home is actually surrounded by faculty from Wheaton College. Got the Billy Graham Institute right here too. So this is a pretty conservative area theologically.

But if you know your, your craft, if you have, if you practice ethically and if you, you know, do a little bit of research so you can answer questions about theology or scripture intelligently, it’s really no problem. There are gonna be some people who simply will never come to you and that’s okay. There are lots of others who will.

Although I’ve had this variation where, and, and I hate to phrase it from a position of, from pain to pleasure, from discomfort, looking for a solution, I found working with people specifically with medical issues, oddly enough, would be that group that would be more likely to bypass whatever previously held beliefs they had.

Mm-hmm. . That they’re looking for something that’s gonna be effective for them. They’ve tried a number of things. It, it’s the downfall. It’s also the benefit that in most cases we’re not their first round treatment for many different things. Absolutely. And when you’re working with something like cancer Care, all of the clients who come are highly motivated, They’re scared, they’re worried, they want help, and they’re gonna take the work very seriously.

That tends to cut through a lot of. Also, I sometimes just, if I get a theological question, I’ll say, I consider this to be really a, a structured scientific form of healing prayer, and I can show using research that people who do hypnosis do better medically. So the hypnotic word is the word that gives life.

And scripture has always said that such words are divine, and that has always been a convincing. Only once if I had someone walk out of a workshop that I was giving, uh, because of a theological objection. And you know, I was, it was an uncomfortable experience cuz she didn’t do it quietly. She announced me in the name of Jesus Christ as she walked out of the room.

But the next day her pastor called me and said, Don’t feel bad. She’s walked out on me too. , you’re in good company. So let me ask you this, in terms of. And I know you do your complimentary medical hypnosis, uh, training. Is that coming up this year at the Guild? No, I think it’s coming up two year cycle. Well, we, we first started the program, we did it every year, and we’ve moved it around the country, but now it’s simply at the convention every second year.

Yeah. We kind of, we’ve taught at this point a lot of people how to do this, uh, this form of, of hypnotic practice. And of course we keep upgrading the curricula. We’re currently on version three point. So it’s changed a lot over the years as we’ve incorporated new techniques and, uh, new research. I’m, I’m very proud of the current version of the, uh, uh, curriculum because the, I’ve really put everything I know how to do into this curriculum, so it, I think it does a very good job of teaching people how to use hyp technology to help people.

Who have a medical challenge, and we use the word complimentary in the sense of to make complete, the goal is to make the medical care receive from the physician more effective. And that’s very much what we do. Uh, my cancer patients are doing conventional cancer care for the most part, but they’re also doing the hypnosis.

And as the physicians have noticed, my people do better, they’re always at the top of the response. They have fewer side effects. They tolerate the treatment better. They live longer. And over the 25 years I’ve been in practice in one area, I have demonstrated that quite well to the satisfaction of the medical community.

That’s fantastic. And especially that perspective of this is one of those places that when I bring up such topics to clients or even talking about it, it’s more so that we’re there in that complimentary position to assist what’s going on. Uh, I think you were one of the first ones I heard speak about.

How do we work in that system to help make the medications more effective, to help make the treatments more effective? That very often in terms of chemotherapy, the amount of dosage that’s being given is based on how much they can tolerate? Correct? Exactly. So with chemotherapy, the, the research is clear.

More is better than less. Well, what happens is a lot of people get a suboptimal dose. because they can’t handle the side effects. Their cell counts crash or the nausea becomes such a a problem. They get dehydrated or they become anorexic. They, they lose so much weight. But if you’re able to use hypnosis to overcome these side effects or to improve the situation for the patient, they can tolerate a higher dose and as a result they do better medic.

So it’s sort of a win-win. The patient’s happy cuz they’re doing medically better. I’m happy cause I’m getting paid. The doctors are happy because they’re getting paid too, and so are the hospitals, and it’s a very good transaction. The only problem we face is that people with cancer over the time they come to a heist, are often tapped out financially.

They’ve paid the deductible or co-payment on their insurance policy. They may be on, uh, disability, and so sometimes finances are a real problem, not for everyone, but for some, and that’s why I maintain my three free programs. So even if a person can’t afford to pay me, I still have something I can do to help them.

But again, my, my practice is not just a hypnosis practice. It is considered a ministry as well, and the charitable portion of that. Therefore, it’s important and there are always enough people who want the most powerful, customized treatment and are willing to pay for that. And that’s how I earn mold.

Excellent. So let’s transition over and head over to just the whole concept of you on the advisory board and the ethics within our profession and kind of a, well, a moment to just kind of ask a simple question, How are we doing right now? , in terms of ethics or in terms of legislation? Cause the, let’s say just in terms of the profession of the, what used to be referred to as the quote lay hypnotist, and let’s perhaps reframe it as the.

The hypnosis practitioner, the non-medical hypnotist, I think as a profession, we’re light years ahead of where we were, say 20 years ago. We are much more professional. We are much more research based. People who, if you talk to the old timers, they’ll tell you stories that are kind of surprising about what it used to be like when you would go to a hyp convention.

And, uh, two thirds of the, uh, workshops were on past lives or talking to angels. We used to have, uh, practitioners who specialized in casting out evil spirits. Um, I’m not making this up. This is what it, what it was. Now we, uh, we understand hypnotic technology better. Our curriculums for training are much better than they were.

We hold our practitioners to a higher standard of practice. The ethics committee rigorously enforce the code of ethics of the National Guild of Heists. So we’re, as a profession, light years ahead of where we were and correspondingly much better accepted by the public. We’re no longer regarded as, uh, you know, sideshow practitioners or, uh, people of dubious moral qualities we’re regarded as valuable professionals in the community.

And we see that that’s why the legislation has become so important, cuz as we become larger as a profession and as we become more respected as a profession, we compete more effectively with other helping professionals and they don’t like, And so we face pressure from them legislatively to kind of keep us under control.

So then let me ask you this. I’m obviously practicing within the appropriate terminology, practicing under the code of ethics A. As we look at this, what is, in your opinion, the best thing that we all could be doing out there just to really advance hypnosis and what we do? Well, I think the best thing was to be, be careful about what you say and what you’re.

As I’ve said many times, legislatively, what’s gonna get you in trouble is the words that come outta your mouth or the words you’ve written down on paper. It is important that you not sound like a medical doctor or a psychologist or a psychotherapist unless you are one in virtue of another credential.

So you shouldn’t be using psychological language in your practice. You shouldn’t be attempting to diagnose, you shouldn’t be talking about treating or prescribing. Anything. And if you use these words, you are entering into the protected scope of practice of other licensed professions and they’ll have something to say about that.

So the very best thing we could all do is be careful about our words. The Guild has created a recommended terminology for hypnotic practice. We give it away on our website. It’s free. Anyone may use it even if they are not members of the National Guild of IUs, and it’s specifically created to keep people out of trouble.

We use common language equivalence for all the problems that a hypnotist would work with on a. We carefully avoid the dangerous words like treat, diagnose, prescribe, and by showing the other professions this degree of respect, they think better of us too. So good fences make good neighbors. And if we’re not trying to pretend to be junior psychologists, we have less trouble with the psychological community and with the medical community and so on.

So be careful about the words. Use proper termin. And I’d even say it even has a lot to do with the number of states where the word hypnotherapy comes under fire, right? I’d be the one to always show the Google search results that about 60,000 people are searching the word hypnotist, and about 17,000 people a month are searching the word hypnotherapist.

So I bow down to Google and give my clients what they’re looking for. On that note, even if I, I am in a state where the word hypnotherapy is non-regulated. We’re fine to use the word. Yeah. Just finding that, again, it comes down to use the terminology. I’ve even shared the experience before that I’ve had clients, and I say this and my, my phrasing on it all is that I, I take a very evolutionary mindset to things that these other professions are still around because.

For a lot of the people, a lot of the time they work and if we were to get a cold, we wouldn’t do a blood letting cuz we found out that doesn’t work. And the same things can be said about hypnosis in terms of this is why we’re still around, this is why this still exists. And in many ways to find those supporting roles.

And it’s interesting to hear. Yes, there sometimes is the see it as competition conversation. Yet I’m looking at my schedule this week and I’ve actually got three medical doctors in the office as clients. Absolutely. I, I have the same sort of thing. I routinely work with medical professionals. It’s not that hard to, to practice cleanly and you’re gonna be better off when the guilt chose to make its, uh, recommendation that we, instead of calling ourselves hypno therapists, we moved to the term consulting hypnotist.

When we made that recommendation, it wasn’t made likely. We, we test marketed this before we, we recommended it. And what we consistently found was the title Consulting Iist tested better with the general public than the term hypnotherapist. So you actually will get more people into your practice as your client if you call yourself a heist versus a hypnotherapist.

It’s a funny thing, The only people who seem to care about this are the practitioners, not the, uh, not the public. And the public prefers the, the term heist. They understand it when they see hip therapists. They immediately think psychotherapists. That you’re telling them that there’s something wrong with them, whereas the, the term hypnotist is much less threatening.

The, uh, and, uh, here in Illinois, the, you can call yourself a hip therapist if you want, but I use the term consulting hypnotist very rigorously, and I’m, I’m happy to do so. It’s, it’s helped me. And some states, of course, the term hypnotherapy is a regulated term and you can’t do it unless you’re licensed as a psychologist or psychiatrist.

Would you say that those decisions would be based more on the word therapy or the word hyn? I think it’s based on the word therapy. Yeah. Increasingly, a state government says, if you’re saying you’re doing therapy, then you should be regulated. You should have a, a license as a some form of therapeutic practitioner.

In Connecticut, a judge actually ruled that hypnotherapy is psychotherapy by means of hypnosis. So if you’re doing hypnotherapy, you have to be licensed to practice. Psychotherapy in that state, whereas in other states they, they, these courts take a different view of it, but the word therapist gets you in trouble and it’s easier to simply call yourself a consulting heist and, uh, to describe consulting hypnotism as, as we do helping ordinary, everyday people with ordinary everyday problems.

And I would. And talking about it in ordinary, everyday language. Thanks for listening to the Work Smart Hypnosis [email protected]. Hey, it’s Jason Lenette here. And just one more quick thing. Have you ever heard the phrase, I felt relaxed, but I don’t know if I was hypnotized. Well, if you’ve heard that statement before, what it basically means is that one of the most important ingredients of your hypnotic session or demonstration simply wasn’t there.

If your participant or your client leaves without the conviction and belief that they really experienced a state of hypnosis, one of the most important and essential ingredients, again, just wasn’t. And what I’ve done for you is I’ve put together some real world tested strategies, powerful proven strategies, things that I make use of before, during, and after my hypnosis sessions that help me to build greater conviction, increase the belief in the process, and by accident, turn my clients into raving fans of their experience.

It’s all put together for you in a program I call hypnotized with conviction. Several different strategies. Again before, during. After your session or even demonstration that I know we’re gonna change the way that you do hypnosis. Whether you’re a hypnotherapist or a stage hypnotist, these techniques are for you.

Check it out online today, hypnotize with conviction.com.