For a brief interview with Dr Richard Bandler on training for doctors, click here
Magic in Practice: Introducing Medical NLP - The Art and Science of Language in Healing and Health
NOW IN ITS THIRD PRINTING
FIVE STAR RATINGS FROM AMAZON.CO.UK AND AMAZON.COM REVIEWERS
“… an elegant and wonderful book … this is the kind of book I hoped one of my students would write”- Dr Richard Bandler, Co-creator and Developer of NLP
“... A brilliantly refreshing antidote to targets and standardising interventions ... Convincing, highly readable and practical”- Speech and Language Therapy in Practice “Easily integrated into NHS practice There is also considerable scope in a private practice setting, so learning this very interesting and enjoyable approach can act as an additional source of income”- 'Non-Clinical Careers', London Deanery
Between a third and half of all patients seeking help from the medical profession are suffering from medically unexplained symptoms, and we are facing an epidemic of complex chronic conditions that have no easily discernible pathology or cause. Pressure for a model of ‘whole-person’ health care has been growing over the past 25 years, but, no practical, cost-effective, integrative model has been suggested, until now.
Medical NLP - developed out of the work of Dr Richard Bandler and the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming - offers for the first time a practical methodology and explicit interventions to help tackle this debilitating array of problems. Supported by new research and extensive clinical experience, Medical NLP offers the only internationally recognised and licensed health practitioner training that seamlessly integrates psychosocial therapeutic approaches with the existing biomedical principles and time constraints of the consultation process.Written in an accessible style for doctors, nurses, therapists and all other allied health professionals, this is a book about solutions, rather than problems.
Important note: Nothing on this site, written or implied, should be regarded as medical advice. Please seek advice for any serious condition from your appropriate health professional. All information is copyright-protected and may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the authors, The Society of Medical NLP, or Dr Richard Bandler, Co-creator and Developer of NLP, whichever is relevant.
Last Updated on Friday, 04 June 2010 18:08
Podcasts by Magic in Practice author Garner Thomson
1. What is NLP? How can healthcare professionals utilise NLP techniques to understand their patients better? What does NLP contribute to the therapeutic encounter? In this West of Scotland Pain Group discussion, Garner Thomson, Training Director to the Society of Medical NLP and Dr Jonathan Bannister, Consultant Anaesthetist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Dundee, discuss the place of NLP in pain management and anaesthesia.
3. Garner Thomson and NLP Expert's Michael Beale discuss hypnosis and the newly published book Garner edited for Dr Richard Bandler - Richard Bandler's Guide to Trance-formation
Please allow up to two minutes for download if you would like to listen to the discussion)
Further evidence that antidepressants simply don’t work (or, at least, don’t work the way the pharmaceutical companies insist they should) comes with the long overdue publication of Professor Irving Kirsch’s aptly named book, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (The Bodley Head).
Professor Kirsch, now at the University of Hull, has published several papers before, including one extensive study in 2002, based on data extracted from the pharmaceutical industry by means of the Freedom of Information Act. This clearly demonstrated that all antidepressants, including the popular SSRIs, had no clinically significant benefit over placebo.
Since the Medical NLP course I attended last year, I have been applying the techniques in virtually all my consultations. As you can imagine, 10 minutes gives precious little time, so often I do double appointments for 20 minutes or even 30 minutes.
Some time ago, I had a very interesting case with a mother who brought in her six-year-old son, saying he would not sleep and that he kept the household up all nigh. She was convinced he had ADHD, but it was quickly obvious that he didn't. I decided to try MNLP.
Some unexpected, but extremely welcome, support for our assertion in Magic in Practice that the medical establishmen, the pharmaceutical industry, and the patients they serve are all conspiring to medicalise much of everyday life comes from the journal, Science and Medicine.
A study by Essex University's Professor Joan Busfield points out that prescriptions, including those for invented or exaggerated conditions, such as "restless legs", "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder", and "sexual dysfunction" have more than doubled in the past 10 years, costing the Health Service £22-million a day.
Our grateful thanks to Laurent Carrer, Ph.D., for permission to post this article:
Some of us will argue the history of our profession begins with Milton Erickson. This exceptional psychiatrist of mythical proportions literally trance-formed our understanding of the unconscious, and his work has had a profound influence on many modern-day masters of change technology such as Richard Bandler, Anthony Robbins and Tad James. He promised his voice would go with us, and it still does, through wonderful transporting stories passed along orally and in written form..
But Dr. Erickson did not emerge out of a vacuum. The roots of our profession extend much deeper, and some of the 20th Century techniques we regard as revolutionary were already in use hundreds of years ago.
A number of readers have emailed us for advice on treating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Several points need to be emphasised before we offer some approaches with which to experiment. First, Medical NLP regards allostatic overload as always an issue. Second, OCD is a strategy adopted in a bid to bring order to an unpredictable world, usually to avoid the threat of death. And, third, the strategy is infantile – similar in structure to the “magical thinking” used by children in the first five or so years of life (don’t step on the crack in case you break your mother’s back).
Growing evidence of strong links between sleep disorders and serious health problems highlights the need for health practitioners of all specialisations to explore and apply effective treatments for insomnia. This blog updates members with the latest research, suggests several Medical NLP-based approaches to the problem, and offers a unique, free resource for your own use and that of your patients and clients.
Voice training is not just for singers. As we say in Magic in Practice, the quality of the spoken word is as important – or, maybe even more important – than what is actually being said. Janet Edwards, Medical NLP Master Practitioner, singer and vocal coach to actors and singers, including international singing sensation Leona Lewis, has created a downloadable MP3 or CD-based programme of special interest to anyone who works and hopes to influence people. To claim The Janet Edwards Power Through Voice - Foundation Workshop at a specially reduced price, act now. Click here for further information.
A surprising number of inquiries we receive come from practitioners working with people diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Several of these report patients suffering from repetitive auditory symptoms, such as a tune that seems to get "stuck" in the head.
While bearing in mind that OCD often results, at least in part, from over-activity of the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and will probably require further treatment, here's a quick technique that is often successful:
Evaluating the relative benefits of different treatments helps the authorities allocate healthcare resources to where they do the most good. Doctors in the UK rely on The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) for advice on the cost-effectiveness of treatments. It recommends that health benefits be valued in terms of "gains in quality adjusted life years" (QALYs). A simple algorithm assigns a value between 0 (for death) and 1 (for full health) to each health state and then multiplies that value by how long the state lasts.
Hmm ... The question is: How does NICE ascertain "quality"?
New Scientist’s cover story (16 May 2009) warning about the effect of language and belief on patients’ health and well-being is long overdue – but goes nowhere near far enough in alerting the medical community to the dangers of careless talk.
The most obvious, and yet the most overlooked, way to deal with heartsinks is not to have them in the first place.
This is less flippant than it sounds. Heartsinks don’t exist independently of the health professional. One of the original presuppositions of NLP was that you (the communicator) hold responsibility for the response you get. Or, to put it another way, if your patient or client behaves adversely, you need to change your tactics – and keep changing them until you get the response you are seeking.
Everybody who cares to look at the placebo agrees that it’s pretty weird. The thing is, the closer you look, the weirder it gets.
For example, how can we begin to understand that an inactive substance can scuttle a pharmaceutical company’s premier drug1, trigger improvement in a study of stem cells in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease2, and act as either a bronchodilator or induce respiratory depression in asthmatics, depending on what either the subjects or the experimenters believe3?
Or, for that matter that fake treatments can bring about unexpected health deteriorations induce headaches and trigger infections, simply because the subjects expect them to.
Until recently, the placebo effect was thought of as a psychological manifestation, probably affecting people of weak intellect or character.
Suddenly, it’s different. Scientists, including Fabrizio Benedetti, Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Turin’s Medical School and arguably the world’s greatest expert in the field, have established without doubt that the placebo effect has identifiable biochemical substrata, confirming the long-held suspicion that it is a profound but natural response to a non-chemical stimulusnudging the organism on to a recuperative course.
In the real world of face-to face health care, medicine that acknowledges and incorporates emotion as an active force is at least as important to good practice as Evidence-Based Medicine.
For years we’ve taught Registrars and undergraduate medical students that however much they are encouraged to embrace evidence-based medicine (EBM), they should not lose sight of what patients expect – recognition of their emotions and the role they play in healing and health. Within Medical NLP, we champion the missing part of a whole-person model, an emotion-based approach to medicine we call EmBM.
