On Sun, 15 Aug 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Tipspeople,
>
> Yesterday morning I heard a psychologist interviewed on the public radio show
> "The Infinite Mind" who claimed that she'd woken up during surgery and could
> feel what was being done to her although she was totally paralyzed from the
> drugs and could not tell anyone she was awake.
>
> She now does most of her work with patients who have reported (sometimes
> under hypnosis) the same experience. While listening to the interview I kept
> having some of the same thoughts that I have about other difficult to verify
> subjective experiences (e.g. sex abuse recollections). Is it possible that
> this (or at least some of these reports) was not a real event? People tend
> to be terrified of surgery.
>
> Is there any data on this particular experience either supporting the
> frequency this psychologist claimed for it (150,000 incidents per year) or is
> this too new, or has it been otherwise verified by anesthesiologists
> themselves who are seeking to eliminate this danger? (Skeptic that I am, I
> still know that stuff happens.)
Aside from the ketamine issue, there are some old papers which purport
to demonstrate that patients under anesthesia may still be aware. One
of these is a study by Levinson (1967) using a methodology which the
ethics committee would never let him get away with today.
Patients underwent surgery using EEG monitoring to ensure deep
anesthesia. However, before the actual surgery began but while the
patient was deeply anesthetized, the anesthetist would stop the
operation and declare (falsely) that the patient's lips were too blue
and the anesthestist would administer more oxygen.
So far, so good (except for ethics). But the post-poperative
assessment is problematic. It was carried out a month later using
hypnosis. Levinson reported that 4 of 10 subjects were able to repeat
"practically verbatim" the anesthetist's words, and a further four
patients exhibited anxiety during the session. His recommendation was
that doctors keep their mouths shut during surgery.
But the assessment was apparently carried out unblinded, and there
were no control cases subjected either to a different "emergency" or
none at all. Moreover, the status of hypnosis as a means of unlocking
inaccessible memories is questionable. What it is known to do is to
make subjects more susceptible to suggestions. It seems likely that
there were plenty of those during the interviews. Suspicious that
Nancy's psychologist found hypnosis necessary in at least some cases
as well. If I were awake during surgery, I sure as heck wouldn't need
hypnosis to remember the experience.
Conclusion: premise unproven.
-Stephen
Reference
Levinson, B. (1967). States of awareness during general anaesthesia.
In: Lassner, J. Hypnosis and psychosomatic medicine. Springer-Verlag.
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Stephen Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470
Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661
Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Lennoxville, QC
J1M 1Z7
Canada Department web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy
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