THANK YOU to all participants in our storming April 2009 Medical NLP Health Practitioner certification training in Stirling, Scotland. We value highly the effort and commitment of everyone who travelled from all over the country - and, from as far afield as Canada and Hong Kong - to join us. Keep watching this space for details of our next Medical NLP Master Practitioner course. Take your helping skills to the next exciting and effective level!
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)
Magic in Practice: Introducing Medical NLP - The Art and Science of Language in Healing and Health
“… 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.
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.
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.
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.
A thorough understanding of sequencing will dramatically increase the options open to any Medical NLP practitioner – especially where time is at a premium. Sequencing, in Medical NLP, refers to the discrete components of a strategy and the order in which they operate1.
To put it another way, while patients and clients experience and describe their condition as a static, nominalised entity (“my depression”, “the irritable bowel syndrome”, “those anxiety attacks”), they are nonetheless engaged in a dynamic process. They are “doing” their problem, each step in the same order, with the same result. If the sequence is interrupted or altered, the end point changes.
Virgina Satir's remark to a young Richard Bandler that people would always make the best choices - when they knew they had them - for a long time seemed to me a somewhat rosy view of human nature (rather like Milton Erickson's belief that everyone had all the resources they needed to make whatever changes were necessary). After all, as health professionals, how often have we witnessed our patients and clients doggedly refusing to make the (superior) choices we offer them?
Why does Medical NLP place such emphasis on techniques to develop ‘right-brain thinking’ when Western healthcare is so firmly bedded in left-brain, linear, objective, evidence-based ‘fact’?
The reason is not to embrace some amorphous New Age notion of ‘intuitive’ medicine, but because recent developments in neuroscience strongly suggest that to remain focused on linear information (‘text’ in the jargon of Medical NLP) at the expense of a more global way of thinking (‘context’) risks slewing the consultation process away, rather than towards, accuracy and effectiveness.
Managing frames is a key, non-verbal skill in Medical NLP, and can make a significant difference in even short, simple consultations.
Most Neuro-Linguistic Programmers are familiar with ‘content’ and ‘context’ reframing. To these skills, we add pre-framing (which, as the name implies, presupposes the consultation will take a specific, positive direction) and in- and out-framing – the quite literal shifting of certain information towards or away from the zone of immediate interaction.
The effects can be profound – but require understanding and practice.
The most frequent call for help and advice on Society of Medical NLP trainings and personal development programmes is: ‘How do I cope with Heartsink patients?’
The Heartsink – a description applied to a wide range of apparently disruptive or recalcitrant patients – seems intent on making your life as difficult as possible. And, the ever-present danger is that if you alienate him (or her), you will be faced with a barrage of complaints, and, possibly, even litigation.
