The power of the mind over the body is undeniable. Science has for a long time now been providing proof for this fact. Patients in chronic pain can use mental exercises to reduce their perception of discomfort. People vulnerable to heart attacks can learn how to mentally slow down their heart rate, people suffering from stress can learn how to use their minds to reduce their blood pressure, women have been taught how to control pain in child birth, and even operations have been performed using hypno-anesthesia.

As well as this, no matter what supposedly incurable diseases there are, there is always somebody who has been cured of it. You may have heard of the miracle man, Morris Goodman, who crashed his airplane and was told he would be a "vegetable" for the rest of his life. He was told he would never breathe on his own without a respirator, he was told he would never walk again. As he says, the only thing he had was his mind, but as long as you have your mind you can put things together again - and this is what he did. As he began to breathe on his own again, the medical team couldn't work out how he had done it. As he walked out of the hospital, they didn't understand that either. It didn't make medical sense, but there is no denying that he healed himself through the power of the suggestions which he gave to himself. And every human being has this ability, this power, within them.

There is no doubt that the mind does indeed control the body. This idea has been known and acknowledged in all ancient cultures across the globe - Greece, China, India, Hawaii, etc. It is only in the Western world where medical research has somehow, over time, come to view the mind and body as separate entities rather than treating the whole person in a holistic manner. But there is now a return towards the acknowledgment of this mind-body connection. There is an increasing body of scientific evidence which reflects this and at the same time proves that the mind controls the body.

In the 1920's Dr Edmund Jacobson, physiologist and foremost researcher on relaxation, proved that when one has stressful anxious thoughts one cannot have relaxed muscles. More recently, Herbert Benson, medical doctor at Harvard Medical School, stated that "because of the fundamental unity of the mind and body it is impossible for one aspect to be relaxed while the other is tense".

In a meta-study on the effective use of adjunctive hypnosis with surgical patients, researchers at the Mount Sinai School of medicine in New York found that patients in hypnosis treatment groups had better clinical outcomes than 89% of patients in control groups. Not only that, they discovered that this result was irrespective of the method of hypnotic induction, be it live or recorded.

Roseanna Leaton, specialist in hypnosis mp3 downloads for health and well-being.