• Canon City Daily Record - February 2, 2002
• Rocky Mountain News - October 11, 1998
• Rocky Mountain News - October 7, 1998

Hypnosis Can Be Good Medicine
One Area Doctor Uses It Nearly Every Day

Is hypnosis real? Can it actually help people?

Scientific American says the answer is "yes."

Throw out your mental image of a mysterious huckster with a swinging watch chanting "You are getting slee-e-epy." In a July 2001 cover story, the highly respected science journal said that 40 years of medical research has placed hypnosis "squarely in the domain of normal cognitive science, with papers on hypnosis published in some of the most selective scientific and medical journals."

"... When used properly, the power of hypnotic suggestion can alter cognitive processes as diverse as memory and pain perception," Scientific American declared.

One who wasn't surprised to read this was Jonathan Sheldon, M.D., a family physician in Englewood who regularly uses hypnosis in his medical practice.

"I began using hypnosis in 1995," Dr. Sheldon said. "I was searching for a well-researched treatment to offer my patients when medication or surgery failed, and discovered that hypnosis can bring the mind and body together to create a powerful tool for natural and effective healing."

What can hypnosis do? Dr. Sheldon has used it successfully, he says, to ease stress-related conditions such as tooth-grinding and nail-biting; to relieve both chronic and acute pain, including pain from cancer and nerve injury; to improve healing after surgery; to treat headaches, phobias such as fear of flying and needles, and irritable bowel syndrome; and to promote healthy eating habits, improved athletic and professional performance, and smoking cessation.

Dr. Sheldon has the professional training to do this - in addition to being a Board-certified family physician he's a member of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. He notes that although unlicensed lay hypnotists do offer their services in Colorado, the technique is most effective when used by well-trained professionals such as physicians, psychologists, and dentists.

"If you're looking to work with a hypnotist," he says, "a good rule of thumb is to choose a practitioner who has professional credentials you've heard of - such as MD, DO, DDS, PsyD, or PhD.

"Hypnosis works with children just as well as with adults," the doctor adds. "It's really a very natural process. If you've ever 'lost yourself' in a book or a movie, so that you hardly noticed the passage of time, you have already experienced a hypnotic moment. The hypnotherapist simply brings you easily into and out of the hypnotic state, to open up your conscious mind to new suggestions for healing and change."

No "Passive Automatons"
There are a lot of myths about hypnosis - and several, Dr. Sheldon says, are simply not true.

"For example, although studies have shown that almost 97 percent of people can experience some degree of hypnosis, no one can be hypnotized against their will. Also, when you're hypnotized you are still very much in control of yourself and your actions - so it's nearly impossible for a hypnotist to force you to do anything that goes against your personal ethics or morals."

Scientific American concurs. "Under hypnosis, subjects do not behave as passive automatons," the magazine reports, "but instead are active problem solvers who incorporate their moral and cultural ideas into their behavior."

Another physician who has used hypnosis in his own work - and who then sought out Dr. Sheldon for hypnosis treatments - is pathologist John Altshuler, M.D., of Greenwood Village.

"I asked Dr. Sheldon to hypnotize me for control of severe pain and insomnia following a spinal-cord and brain injury after a serious bicycle accident," Dr. Altshuler said. "Spectacular results followed."

Dr. Sheldon can tell many other true stories from his practice. For example, he recalls the patient who came to the emergency room in severe pain because the wound from her recent abdominal surgery had opened. While she and Dr. Sheldon waited for a nurse to set up intravenous morphine, the doctor asked if the patient would like to try hypnosis.

"She did - so I hypnotized her," he says. "By the time the nurse came back, the patient was entirely free of pain, and we were chatting and joking together."

If you would like to learn more about hypnosis, you might check into the July issue of Scientific American - or get in touch with Dr. Sheldon at (303) 789-4949

Rocky Mountain News
October 11, 1998
'Mai tai' hypnosis dulls flu-shot phobia

by BILL JOHNSON

It was early in the morning when he climbed out of his car carrying 10 feet of rope, a roll of duct tape and a black, 8-inch skillet. "I'm hoping we won't need this," he said somberly.

Wise guy.

Yet over the next hour he would take me places I didn't know existed. By looking closely at, of all things, my thumbnail. He said he could snatch all my fears and toss them out the window. And he pretty much did.

Even when his medical assistant, the one with the big smile and soothing "It'll be OK" walked in with the needle, I didn't as much as flinch. She didn't try to hide it or do the secretive in-a-flash loop from behind her back and into my right bicep. No, I just sat there, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. "Are we ever going to do this?" I finally asked. "We're done," he said.

The good Dr. Jonathan Sheldon of Englewood is, well, good. Mostly because he never once had to chase me down and kept his word that the flu shot he would administer, and which I publicly dreaded here last week, would not hurt.

He looked nothing like I had envisioned. And that was one of the biggest surprises. The man on the phone said he once was a hippie, hung out for a time with Muddy Waters and was a Buddhist monk for eight years. The clean-cut guy I met looked like he'd made a bad left turn on his way to Wall Street. Assumptions, he said simply, are terrible things.

He got started by showing and letting me handle his instruments of torture. Long, long needles. Short ones. Blood drawers. "They're no different than, say, a table saw," he calmly said. "In fact, these do less damage."

OK, but my heart still pounded.

He would hypnotize me, he said, get me in touch with my innate ability to concentrate on something other than the needle and the shot. The needle I was holding? Why was I fretting so? he asked. It's nowhere near my arm. "Just relax and focus your attention elsewhere," he said soothingly as we sat in his office. He had me hold a quarter between my index finger and thumb and concentrate on my thumbnail. The quarter would get heavy, he said softly. It did.

He made me sit back, to try to look at my forehead. Close your eyes, he said. Breathe deeply. The next thing I know I'm on a beach, slurping a mai tai. I liked it there.

We did this three times before the assistant with the long needle came in. "Remember the beach," he said. "Breathe deeply." She'd put the bandage on before I recognized where I was.

I've kidded and taken a lot of ribbing about this flu-shot thing, but it truly is no laughing matter. I've been bombarded with flu-shot calls and e-mails, the worst coming from a woman who developed and still can't shake a monstrous case of hives after getting one. She'll never get another, she said. "But if you and everyone else gets one, I'll be OK," she wrote.

I've heard from three people with leukemia, one who called me a "wimp" because of my fear of needles. "If you had to get stuck as many times as I have over the years, to the point where I really have no good veins, you'd get over your fears," she wrote.

And then there's the influenza data, a lot of which is chilling. Thousands of people, mostly elderly, will die this year from influenza. You're over 65? Get a shot.

Still scared? Well, I do know a guy with some rope, duct tape and a skillet.

Rocky Mountain News
October 7, 1998
Flu shot? Me? I'll take flu any day.

by BILL JOHNSON

I'd do it, but I'm too chicken. There, I said it.

Chicken, chicken, chicken!

They'd have to hogtie, gag and slam me over the head with an iron skillet before I'd sit still for a flu shot. And no, I don't care if weeks from now I'm lying delirious in bed, puking up my pancreas. Nobody's sticking a needle anywhere in me.

Good Lord, I hate 'em. I've said this before and been given volumes of suggestions and tips on what to do when confronted with the terrible needle. But only one works.

Just ask the kindly nurse practitioner, who had to get a blood sample from me during a doctor's visit a couple of months ago. I told -- no, literally begged -- him NOT to show me the vial thinggy that has the big needle. "Oops, I forgot," he said nonchalantly and with a shrug when he turned around with the thinggy and a cotton ball in his hands.

"Wait, no!" I pleaded, getting off the exam table and demanding to know why he defied me. "Oh, it won't hurt," he said as he began stalking me, trying to cut me off as I danced, bobbed and weaved this way and that around the table. Only when he called me a "baby" did I submit. Nobody calls me a baby.

But I won't volunteer for a shot. I don't care how much the newspapers and TV try to scare us. The other day they said people can -- get this -- die from the flu. And the only way to avoid getting killed is by getting a flu shot. Yeah, right.

"You can die from the flu!" exclaimed Dr. Jonathan Sheldon, an Englewood family practitioner, who not only is offering to stick me, but swears it will not hurt.

"Look," he says, "you can avoid the shot, but if you get the flu, I'm telling you, you'll wish you were dead." I wasn't biting, so he resorted to his psychology act. "I'm scared of shots, too," Dr. Sheldon said. "Oh, I could stick a needle anywhere in you, but I just can't bear them."

We agree that it mostly stems from our childhood when the doctor would come by the house and ask if your throat hurt. Not fools and knowing he was packing a needle, we'd say no. "How about your ears?" They don't give shots for ears, you think. So you'd nod. In a blur he'd flip you, yank down the jammies and WHAM! "I've discovered it doesn't hurt in real life nearly as much as you think it does," Dr. Sheldon says. He can do it, he advises, one of two ways. I can bring a friend, and when he approaches I can turn my head, squeeze the friend's hand real hard and hang on. "Truth? That helps about as much as peeking through your fingers at a scary movie."

Or he can hypnotize me. "I'm serious," he says. He did it once on a 12-year-old girl, who'd been banned from every dentist's office and ER in town. "Oh, she really tore the places up." He got her trust finally by letting her stick him with a little, tiny needle. "She got through it."

There's a lot of people like me. Too many, really, he says. They avoid vaccinations, and if they're elderly or have diseases such as diabetes, they catch the bug and can, and sometimes do, die.

"But you're a young guy," he says. "Why risk three to five of the most miserable days of your life?" OK. OK. I'll try the hypnosis, I say. Besides, I'm sort of attached to my pancreas.

All the same, if Dr. Jonathan Sheldon really is smart, he'll have a lariat, duct tape and a cast-iron skillet when I get there.