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 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"?
