A.    Stephen LaFevers is a husband, father and owner of two cats. He has been studying hypnosis for more than 50 years. He is a Registered Nurse Practitioner, Certified Family Nurse Practioner licensed to prescribe medicine, and is a Certified Advanced Hypnotherapy Specialist and a Registered Hypnotherapy Instructor.

He is a writer, primarily of medical fiction. His thriller, Dreams of April Ten was an Eppie Award Finalist. He has also written a book for advanced EMTs, Pre-Hospital Care for the EMT-Intermediate, in addition to Hypnosis in Healthcare.

A.    I was teaching classes in hypnotherapy and discovered there was not a good text to teach from, so I wrote one that is easy to read and includes examples of easy trance inductions and prescriptions for change.

A.    I never really thought of calling the book anything other than Hypnosis in Healthcare. After all, I was a primary healthcare provider who also used hypnosis in my practice. Many people, you know, go to doctor after doctor with the same complaints and never seem to have them resolved. They keep trying to lose weight, or stop smoking, or clear up a skin condition, and never really get anything from their healthcare provider but reassurance and medicines that don’t seem to help. With hypnosis, at least these people have a chance to get what they are seeking.

A.    There are literally as many techniques as there are people practicing hypnosis, thousands probably. I only cover a dozen or so in the book, but many of them are easily mastered. The real secret to hypnosis is that you don’t really have to hypnotize anyone in order to use hypnosis and this book shows you how to do that.

A.    People come to the clinic with certain expectations in mind. I’ve found that it is best to use those expectations to advantage. What you expect to happen tends to happen and what you expect to work tends to work. I like using the hypnodisk, that spinning spiral you sometimes see at the beginning of the Twilight Zone, because most people expect that to hypnotize them. After all, it has no other purpose. However, if a client has other expectations, I will use another technique or perhaps will forego a formal induction all together.

A.    I’ve been writing seriously for about 20 years. It took me that long to get my first book into a presentable shape for submission. Writing in my spare time now and then, I didn’t usually get much done. I now write full-time and so I get more work done. I have two books coming out next year, a humorous science fiction/fantasy adventure with a cliff-hanger ending to nearly every chapter. It is called The Last Guardian and will be published by Mundania Press. Mundania is also publishing a medical thriller/horror novel called Dark Moon that I wrote with Canadian author, Beverley Bateman.

A.    I’ve written two books on emergency care for EMTs, Hypnosis in Healthcare, Dreams of April Ten, The Last Guardian, and Dark Moon. I’ve also written numerous magazine articles on emergency care and on computers.

A.    That’s an interesting question. I consider myself primarily a science fiction writer, although everything I write seems to turn out to be another genre. When I wrote Dreams of April Ten, for example, I thought it was a scif book, but the publisher said it was a medical thriller. I thought The Last Guardian was scifi, but it seems to be a fantasy. Dark Moon started out to be scifi but somehow became a horror story.

A.    Actually, I’m working on two books. That’s not really a good way to write quickly, but it is what I’m doing. I’m working on a book about using hypnosis to increase or explore ESP, and I’m working on a sequel to Dark Moon.

A.    I would like for people to come away from Hypnosis in Healthcare knowing that hypnosis is a natural state that happens to everyone every day. It is not magic and doesn’t require any special skill. Great changes can be made with very little practice. The first hypnotherapist didn’t even know he was using hypnosis or even that there was such a thing, yet he helped hundreds of people. How much more can a person do who understands what is really happening?