ain much unlike people from America and Western Europe. Situations that would seem very painful to Americans may not seem so painful to people of more primitive cultures. It is believed that if one is brought up to think that a surgery will cause little pain, then that is what will happen. In China, for instance, children are conditioned to believe that surgery such as tonsillectomies cause little or no pain (Baker, 1990, p. 200). This kind of conditioning is extremely important in determining what is painful and what the level of pain experienced is. According to Wagstaff (1981), if Esdaille was able to carry out operations without pain on the East Indians, this does not mean that he would have been successful if he had tried this with Americans or Europeans.The way surgery is done under hypnosis varies. One way of suppressing pain during surgery without anesthetics is through the placebo affect. Until recently, it is very possible that many medicines were placebos, i.e., sugar pills. So, it was not the medicine that brought about pain relief but the belief that one had ingested medicine (Baker, 1990, p. 201). According to Baker (1990), an example of the use of placebos was during World War II when two surgeons without any access to anesthetics were forced to use hypnosis as a painkiller. The two surgeons suggested anesthesia from fake morphine pills, and it worked. Distraction also works well. An example of this is one needs to get stitches in his/her leg, the nurse would squeeze the patient's hand very hard to try and distract the pain from the leg to the hand. Other distractions may include imaging a fantasyland, or trying to imagine that one’s body is completely numb in the area where the pain is coming from. This may include taking very deep breaths. “All of these activities serve well to reduce the amount of felt and reported pain” (Baker, 1990, p. 200). In addition to the placebo effect and sugg...
