Ok, so I like quirky media stories, I get intrigued by them… Especially if they get somehow intertwined with hypnosis and hypnotherapy… I have a couple of such stories today…
The Daily Mail has run a story about a grandmother who has been left virtually housebound for two years because she burps uncontrollably… Yes indeed, we have had non-stop hiccupers… We have had all kinds of fears and unusual behaviours… Now we have a lady who cannot stop burping… I know lots of children who would love to have this excuse…
Jean Driscoll, 72, said she started belching two years ago and despite visits to two doctors and three hospitals, noone has been able to diagnose what it wrong with her.
The grandmother-of-five from Chelmsford, Essex, has spent hundreds of pounds on medicine and possible cures and said she is being forced to pay to see a specialist privately because the NHS cannot help her.
Ok, I’m not joking about this anymore, just because it is burping, I can’t keep on sniggering childishly because it is really upsetting her life… The article continues:
Mrs Driscoll said: ‘I don’t go out anymore because I’m too embarrassed. People laugh and stare at me.
‘One man said ‘Can’t you control that noise?’ It’s awful travelling to the hospital on the train, everyone looks at you. My friend explained I can’t help it but people still look disgusted.
‘I make them (noises) all day long, they only stop when I lay down.‘
Now here’s a thing… They stop when she lies down… She is capable of stopping, it is just the conditions that need to be right… I’d use hypnotherapy to have her mind recreate those same conditions while she is up and walking around…
Though the article does add this:
She has spent more than £700 on prescription and over the counter medicine for anti wind and acid reflux, undergone allergy testing and given up milk and diary products to see if that helped.
The pensioner has also had acupuncture and hypnotherapy but nothing has stopped her constant burping.
She said: ‘It seems to get worse with stress and it is worse in the mornings.
Hmmm… I wonder what the hypnotherapist did… I hope it was not just some direct suggestion to stop the burping…
For me, the fact that it has gradations of how bad it is, shows that there is a way to turn it up and down… And the fact that it stops at times shows that her body and mind know how to do that, doesn’t it?
With any ailment that is not absolutely consistent and persistently the same, the fact that certain things make it better or worse, or that it desists under certain circumstances shows that a change can be made…
While this is very serious for the lady concerned, I am moving on to things I consider even more seriously… Another article in the Daily Mail that is very slanted toward attempting to ban certain pain killers from the public shoppers environment…
I feel for these people who get addicted to codeine and solpadene, I really do even though it’s been shown that the use of medicinal herbs like Kratom can help with their addiction, if you read the accounts in this article, you’ll see how those addictions can ruin lives and make a serious dent in someone’s health… Nearly killing some people… For example:
Penny, a 43-year-old IT support worker from Lincolnshire, became so dependent on Nurofen Plus that, while living in the U.S. for a brief period, she had friends post boxes of Nurofen Plus to her, because, revealingly, codeine-containing products are not sold over the counter there.
By 2004, back in England, she was experiencing severe pain and was diagnosed with ulcers caused by the amount of ibuprofen in her system.
‘I knew I had to cut back, but I found it so so hard,’ she said. ‘I can honestly say my life was dreadful and depressing, a grey and flavourless existence.’
Finally, encouraged by friends, she was able to appeal to her doctor and, by June 2007, she felt ready to stop and, with the aid of hypnotherapy and her local Drug and Alcohol Action Team, she has now stopped taking the drug completely.
Good to see hypnotherapy helping her along, eh?
But is the answer to ban the drugs and take them away? Why not do the same with alcohol… That can be just as unhealthy, addictive and problematic, yet I bet the writer of the article likes to have a glass of wine when they want…
Too often, we tend to think that we need to ban something as the only answer… So the rest of us get treated the same way as people who got addicted… I have read some crazy material about the ill-effects of Nurofen and other pain killers freely available and I would not take any of them, but should that choice be made for me all because some other people got addicted?
I am not so sure… Libertarian politics all round today I think 😉
