Melbourne: A psychiatrist has recently claimed that hypnosis can be used instead of anaesthesia to relieve pain, even in major surgeries.

The psychiatrist, Bob Large of the Auckland Regional Pain Service, said that hypnosis can be applied to around 10 to 15 percent of the population, adding an Australian doctor had already used the technique as a painkiller for abdominal surgery.

But he said the approach was only rarely used.

Large said that hypnosis was only used when requested by the patients who had earlier experience side effects of anaesthesia.

“That kind of person, if they are engaged in an appropriate clinical way, can develop profound hypnotic analgesia, and can have an operation quite painlessly,” the Herald Sun quoted him as saying.

“There is a lot of surgery that is done with local anaesthesia, epidurals, and sometimes with sedation … and there is the potential there for marrying the two kinds of techniques and engaging the patient in developing analgesia that will give the sense of control.

“It’s very good for people to feel that they have some internal resource, that they’ve got some ways of coping.

“It just makes them feel in control. And sometimes it can just melt their pain away totally. It’s rare, but it can happen,” Large said.

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