Thoughtful clinicians have always believed that the alterations in brain function associated with hypnosis would one day come to be defined. This belief is inherent in the now outmoded concept 'hypnotic trance', and was encouraged by the sometimes uncontrolled observations of physical changes brought about by hypnosis. These have included relief from pain, anaesthesia, changes in the skin's allergen hypersensitivity response, reduction in the inflammatory responses to burns, control of the rate of blood coagulation and so forth. The absence of proof of reliable alterations in brain activity from mid-century psychophysiological studies, however, gave backing to the psychosocial theories of imaginative participation and role-playing, which have dominated scientific thinking until recently. Over the past decade, advances have been made in delineating systematic changes associated with hypnosis. What is more, in the prehypnotic state, high-susceptibility hypnotic subjects have shown neuro-physiological differentiation from those with low susceptibility. Whilst there is no doubt that in the clinical context a patient must be a willing participant in hypnosis, recent work suggests that to say that the influence of hypnosis on pain, blood coagulation, inflammatory responses, removal of warts, etc. is simply the result of role-playing or other psychosocial dynamics, is naive.
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