Dr Lemmon Interviews John McGrail- About the Power of Hypnotherapy for Cancer Side Effects & Pain

Introduction to Dr. John McGreal 0:00

So welcome to this episode of the Cancer Support Channel, I'm Dr. David Levin, and I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Dr. John McGrale. And John McGrale, PhD, is a clinical hypnotherapist and self-improvement expert and the author of The Synthesis Effect. And he's worked with several cancer patients with hypnotherapy to help with side effects and improvement of outcomes. And he's a cancer survivor himself. So I'm really excited to hear his story. Dr. John, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you, David.

I really appreciate it. And this is a really special subject to me. As you mentioned, I am a cancer survivor, so I've got firsthand experience in relation to what it does when you hear that word associated with yourself. It's pretty scary. And I've been working with cancer patients. Well, I suppose I should go back. You asked me to introduce myself a little bit. I am a clinical hypnotherapist, and I've been in full-time practice. For just under 25 years, I have had a wonderful life in terms of careers.

I was a military and commercial pilot for many years. I got into film and TV and did that for quite a long time, which led me down several paths. And I reached the crossroad of my life. where I was laid off from a job because of a merger that didn't go well. There's a phenomenon back in 2000, 2001 called the dot com boom. And it's when the internet exploded and all these dot com companies were spending millions and millions and millions of venture capital dollars and often

Career Path and Transition to Hypnotherapy 1:32

not producing anything. And our little profitable media production company got bought by a dot com and they took us with them when they went out of business. So I was suddenly at 40 something unemployed and I just decided that I didn't want to be somebody's VP of anything anymore in TV and film. I wanted to do something more substantive. So I looked at all the jobs I'd ever had and I realized that throughout my careers, I always ended up being an instructor. I was a military flight instructor. I was a commercial flight instructor when I was with the airlines.

I did a lot of training. And what I, in my corporate life, I realized that what I enjoyed most was not really the work. It was coaching and mentoring the people that work for me. So I started looking for something that would allow me to use that urge to serve with my own personal experience. And I looked at medical school. I looked at naturopathy as the path you went down. I looked at classical conventional psychology. I looked at divinity school. And through that search, I discovered a hypnotherapy college in Los Angeles, where I lived at the time, that had an incredible reputation.

They were the first at the time, the only federally accredited school of hypnotherapy. And I had used hypnotherapy myself to quit smoking and to make some really big personal changes. So I knew it worked. Anyway, long story short. I contacted them, went to meet them, signed up the next day and a year later opened my practice. And that was not quite 25 years ago. And I like to say, I've never worked a day since. It's been a joyful experience. I've worked with thousands and thousands of clients now and many, many cancer patients.

And I'm just really excited about it to this day. I just look forward to going to work every day. So here I am. And as I said, I am a cancer survivor myself. I had prostate cancer a few years back. So that feeling you get, when you're in an oncology ward and it's you that's the patient is hard to describe and it is really life-changing and mind-wracking. So there's a lot of stuff that goes into it as you know and to be able to help people through that experience and I used my own experience to help myself is really very gratifying.

So were you able to use Hypnotherapy on yourself through the prostate cancer diagnosis? well i use a form of self-hypnosis in meditation every i've been a meditation practitioner for probably 30 years and it is an incredibly powerful tool once you learn how to do it and you know that in our culture there's a sort of a stigma around meditate oh i can't do that it's too hard that western culture doesn't really embrace the more holistic methodologies as much as they might for many reasons. But I've been a meditator and I use self-hypnosis literally every day.

And yes, I used it to help my attitude, to help mitigate the stress. And fortunately, I didn't have to go through chemo or radiation. I had surgery and I had a very great outcome with that so far. So I escaped that part of it. but it's a big, the mind and your mindset and your attitude has a huge effect on your physiology.

Using Self-Hypnosis During Cancer Treatment 4:22

I mean, that's scientifically proven. That's one of the things that we have to work on first is the mindset. If you have a positive, aggressive mindset, I'm not gonna let this beat me. I'm gonna get well. I'm gonna do what I have to do. Your body responds at a cellular level. So it is a very powerful process. Long answer to a short question. Yes, I did. And it's exciting. Like Deepak Chopra talks about your cells and listening to your moods. I love that. So how, what's the process that you go through when you're working with a cancer patient, they're in fear, they're nervous, they're looking for grasping for cures, researching things.

What is your process to educate them and to work with them? Well, when people reach me or find me, it's often a last resort. And usually there's a specific reason they come in. The most specific reasons are stress management and to help ease the anxiety, and then to mitigate as much as possible the side effects of the treatments, because the treatments for cancer, as you well know, and anybody out there who's listening who's gone through it knows, are pretty grueling. So we can, you know, and because hypnosis is such a powerful tool for pain management and stress management, and we can really reduce and sometimes even eliminate the side effects of chemo and radiation, not completely always, but I've seen some amazing outcomes.

So people are going to go through a chemo protocol and they're afraid because they know that they're likely to have some severe side effects and they're not, they don't feel good. And what I do first with everybody, regardless of why they come in is educate them. as to how the mind and body work together. Because again, in modern Western culture, we are all about the allopathic model, most of us. If you have a symptom, take a pill and then we'll hopefully cure it or we'll cut it out of your body.

And we don't think about the power of the mind and the spirit and whether we like it or not. We are all more than just the mind and the body. We are mind, body, and this serial energy, this substrate that runs through all living things called spirit. You can call it whatever you want, but it's there. We've got the science behind it. When we balance our energies correctly, it's amazing what we can do. So we can use hypnosis for pain management.

How Hypnotherapy Helps Cancer Patients 6:30

We can use it to reduce side effects. We can use it to ease the stress and anxiety involved with the diagnosis and the treatment because it's pretty scary. We can even use it as an anesthesia, believe it or not. There are people who have to have surgery who are allergic to chemical anesthesia and we can condition the mind to literally numb that part of the body. And I have seen amazing things. Not everybody can do it, but those who can, can have major abdominal surgery or major surgery anywhere and not feel a thing with no drugs.

And to watch that happen is just mind boggling. So it's a very powerful protocol. A natural state of consciousness, we all experience it every day. But when it's used correctly as a tool, it can help us create exceptional outcomes. Have you had experience with those surgeries yourself? No, I do not do anesthesia. It is a specialty and it takes a lot of conditioning. So that's not an area that I get into. But I do often work with pain management, not just with cancer patients, but with any kind of analgesic.

The mind controls most of our perception of pain. Most of our perception of pain is emotional. About 80% of a human being's perception of pain is emotional. That gives us a big range that we can learn to control. And it's astounding to watch it. Maybe even more astounding to experience it. People with low back pain, for instance, come in level 10. They can't even bend over and in 10 minutes they feel nothing. Now you have to practice that and you have to work on it. And it's not forever always, but It is a very powerful thing.

Our mind controls our body. It is as simple as that. Once we accept that, we can use the power of the mind to gain a lot more control over our physical status. Well, the power of the placebo effect and the power of suggestion to create physical link. I think a lot of people have the misconception that it's just separate, that it's just in your mind. And then it's just this mind over matter concept, but it is mind creating matters. When you change your beliefs, it really does create new molecules inside your body and inside your cells that create new messages.

And it actually, through neuroplasticity, you're actually creating new brain connections and rewiring your brain in a lot of different ways. So that's just exciting, the brain science behind it all. It is. It's amazing. And for those who are interested, there's a fellow, I'm sure you've heard of him, Dr. Joe, who wrote an incredible book called You Are the Placebo. And the studies and the experiments that he describes, he himself is a miracle. He was injured in a motorcycle accident and was paralyzed.

And they told him, you're never going to walk again. And he's laying on his on in traction with his face down. And they said, this is it. This is how you're going to spend the rest of your life. And he said, I don't think so. and literally meditated himself into health into wellness. He healed his body, which allopathic medicine said could not be healed. He's now one of the world's leading experts on this whole mind body dynamic and the power of the mind, neuroplasticity, et cetera. Bruce Lipton is another fellow.

I don't know if you've heard of him, but he wrote a great book called The Biology of Belief. And I highly recommend anybody that's going through any of these kinds of experiences. Take a look at those books and you'll see And the people in those books are no different than you and me.

Mind-Body Science and Belief Change 9:35

We're all the same. When we learn how to marshal that incredible power, it's amazing what can happen. So yes, absolutely. Mind creates matter. There's no question about it. We have the science behind it. It's not some woo-woo new age thing. You know, we're talking about gongs and crystals. That's all just sort of superfluous to it or analogous to it. But the biology behind it, the whole field of epigenetics. For instance, we may have the gene for a certain condition, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to express.

The environmental impact has a lot to do with that. And that includes cancer. Exactly. That's exciting. So you wrote your book called The Synthesis Effect. Yes. What other modalities have you brought into hypnotherapy to make it even more powerful for people? Well, one of the biggest ones, of course, and I've already mentioned it is meditation, which, you know, for whatever reason gets short shrift in our society. But meditation has been used for since the dawn of civilization, 7000 years as has hypnosis.

They are very complimentary. Hypnosis is a state of consciousness that helps us create change very quickly. and meditation is a very similar feeling state of consciousness that actually affects a different part of the brain that helps maintain that change systemically. So if you think about bringing those two modalities together, harnessing the power of the mind to create change quickly and harnessing the power of the mind to maintain it systemically, It's a wonderful combination. There's also a technique called neuro-ombistic programming, which taps into so many different disciplines and essentially is a way, as much as you can, of codifying how and why we behave the way we do.

And if you can formalize how and why a certain person behaves or feels the way they do, and you understand it, then it gives you the opportunity to make changes. So that's a big part of the synthesis process. And just the whole concept of the fact that mind creates matter, as you mentioned. The synthesis process, as we were discussing before we got on the air, is about taking different methods, traditions, and models. Some of them are cutting-edge science, some of them are as old as civilization themselves, some holistic practices from indigenous cultures, which are usually meditative in some way.

When you bring them together, You change the entire energy of your mind and your body. We are nothing more than energy processing machines. We don't think of ourselves that way, but that's really what we are. And the entire universe that we live in and are part of and connected to is nothing more than energy moving one way or another. It takes different forms, different wavelengths. And so we see and feel different things. But at the base of it all, energy is energy and is energy. So synthesis is about learning to use your energies to create a better you, which is the name of my company.

Beautiful. Thank you. So as far as cancer patients you worked with, obviously you can't make any claims or promises about cancer outcomes, but have you observed any powerful or miraculous outcomes as a result of your work? Well, I haven't seen anybody with cancer who didn't undergo treatment cure themselves.

The Synthesis Effect and Combined Modalities 12:40

I know it's happened. I've read about it. I see the studies. I have not been engaged in anything like that because usually if someone is diagnosed with, first of all, Hypnotherapists are not licensed in most states and around the world. It is not a licensed profession. So we are not legally allowed to work on any kind of a medical or psychogenic condition without referral from a licensed physician like yourself. That's number one, at least if you are ethical. So nobody's going to come to me and say, I have cancer, help me cure it.

The people who come to me have been diagnosed are usually undergoing traditional treatments, whatever they may be, and are looking for help to manage the side effects. The side effects being the stress and the fear. Fear in and of itself is devastating to the body. Stress is devastating to the body. The chemicals that we have our endocrine system inject into our body when we're feeling stress, fear or anxiety like cortisol and adrenaline are very powerful, but they're also very corrosive. So that's the last thing you want.

You want healing. So I help people deal with the diagnosis. deal with the stress, create a mindset because our mind can create our reality so that they are in the best place to be to heal and get well and benefit from the treatments they're undergoing, whether it's surgery and or chemo and or radiation or all three. And I have seen some incredible outcomes. I had a patient about two years ago who had stage four pancreatic cancer, which is one of the worst, as you know, very aggressive. And he had the Whipple procedure and was looking at a very, very rigorous, noxious chemo regime.

And he was pretty weak. And so I had the opportunity to work with him for about a month before he started the process. And believe it or not, he went through that entire chemo protocol with no side effects. and basically helped him program his body so that the chemicals would affect only the disease tissue and bypass the rest. And he sailed through it. It's just, that's probably one of the biggest success stories I can tell you right off the top of my head. And I was just blown away by his attitude and his ability to do that.

I'm working with a stage four pancreatic cancer patient now who went through the Whipple procedure and is working to get his appetite back. This gentleman is different. He's a type A personality. He was very robust and active before his diagnosis. And he's pushing the limits too far. He gets down on himself if he's not progressing as fast as he wants to. And that doesn't help his recovery. So we're helping him maintain a balance between being aggressive, which you want to be, and doing as much as you can, but not pushing the envelope.

And we're helping him understand that it's going to maybe take a little bit longer than he'd like it to.

Cancer Outcomes and Patient Success Stories 15:20

which was the same case with me. I had to pull back my enthusiasm for getting well. So these are all the kinds of things. It's about establishing the correct mindset that's going to help a given person get through whatever it is they have to go through. Was that post a surgery or before surgery or? It was post surgery. They did the Whipple procedure and then worked with you and then started chemo and no hair loss or nausea or anything from the chemo. I don't know about the hair loss. I don't remember, but no nausea and no vomiting.

The first client and this, this gentleman has gone through the Whipple chemo and radiation and is then had a secondary surgery at five surgeries, no, three surgeries in five days, just about eight weeks ago. and they removed the remainder of the pancreas, which apparently, I'm not really well versed in this, but apparently that's very rare that you can actually live without a pancreas. And I've only been working with him for about three weeks now, but the difference in his color, in his energy, in his attitude between when we started three weeks ago, and I just had a session with him yesterday, it's incredible.

It's just incredible what the mind can do when it's given the right assistance. Yeah, it must be really rewarding to be in that field where you can see that with your own eyes. It really is. And it's one of the reasons I don't really take credit for it. I am a firm believer in some of the indigenous philosophies that profound that any healer, regardless of how they do what they do, is only working through a higher power. And I'm not getting religious here, but if we accept the fact that there is this underlying energy that seems to be at work.

And again, we have the scientific evidence, the experimentation that says there's got to be something going on here. It is. It's incredibly gratifying. It is not an ego trip, but it is very satisfying to know that I'm doing something that's helping other people transform themselves. And, you know, if It's something that we all need to do, not just in times of disease. We need to create more energetic balance in our culture if we're going to survive. We are so energetically imbalanced. And that's why some diseases like cancer run so rampant because our mind, our body, and our spirits are just out of balance.

And again, there's nothing woo-woo about this. It is simply the nature of energy and how we function. Yeah, when a society is sick, the individuals in the society increase in sickness as well. So we need to heal on a personal level and a family level and society level. And you're doing your part to help with that healing. As are you. And, you know, I'm sure you would say the same thing. I'm sure your work is incredibly satisfying because you're right there in the front lines and you can see, you know, not all stories are success stories, but more are than not.

And that's always good. Yeah, I need to find more people like you to refer patients to. I work with a lot of chronic pain patients as well. So they have, they come in that with that belief of like, we'll see him at the next visit and they're like, has your pain gotten better or worse? And they're like, well, it's obviously never going to get better. It's like, well, if you have that belief, then you're blocking your healing process from getting better. Like body is designed to heal. So let's get you healing and not be stuck on this belief of it's never going to get better.

So I struggle with changing that belief in some of my patients and so someone with a little bit more expertise like yourself would be great to refer to as well to work with that chronic pain picture to shift those beliefs into the body can heal, the body can renew itself. Every time you cut your finger, it's going to stop, it's going to heal and the body has a healing system and it's designed to correct itself if you give it the right raw materials.

Pain Management and Mind-Body Medicine 18:55

And the body has the ability of controlling the neural pathways and think about cutting your finger, how often and I'm sure everybody out that's listening to us can identify with this. You cut your finger, you don't even know it. and then you look at it and you see the blood and then it starts to hurt and before that you hadn't noticed a thing well that's a neural pathway and when you see it you say uh-oh this is supposed to hurt when the brain says okay boink and we can control that sometimes to an incredible extent sometimes bypassing that pathway completely and again that's you know that's what happens when hypnosis for instance is used as anesthesia we condition the mind to be able to numb that part of the body that's affected, and not everybody can do it, but many, many people can, and it's quite a process, but it can be done.

And so we can manage our pain to a great extent, and people can gain a lot of mobility. I've worked with our arthritis patients, I've worked with back patients, fibro-neuralgia, and all of these, a lot of the sort of pain-producing conditions that we suffer from in our society have a huge stress and emotional component to them anyway. And it's amazing how with the right mindset and the right training, your mind can literally eradicate it. Again, not always. I've had patients or clients, we call them clients in my parlance.

I've had clients that have come to me and just couldn't get through that mindset of it's never going to get better no matter what I did or what we did. And they didn't get better. But then I have other ones that have come to me and suddenly they're living their life again. And what was a level eight or nine level pain is now one or two. It's just incredible what the mind can do. We can take pain in the back and move it to the little finger where it's a little bit more tolerable. And the brain is happy to do that.

The brain is just our processor. The mind controls it all. Are you familiar with Dr. John Sarno's work in mind-body medicine for pain? Absolutely, yeah. I've read a lot of his stuff and I've seen some of his videos and there is proof positive right there. You know, people are listening to this and saying, oh, this can't be real. It is real. It is absolutely real. And he's, you know, boy, one of the leaders in the whole area of the mind-body dynamic. Do you use any emotional freedom technique, EFT tapping type of modalities with the synthesis?

I do. The beauty of synthesis is that it's ever expanding and ever growing. It's about taking different models and techniques, bringing them together in just the right way. That's the art of it. That's the fun of it. you know, taking the science and finding a way, the art of it to help. And I've been certified in EFT for probably 20 years now. I don't use it as much as I used to because I found other techniques or developed things on my own or learned from other people that it's just maybe not necessary, but it's there.

And for some folks, it's amazing. powerful, powerful tool. What about the Emotion Code? Dr. Bradley Nelson, are you familiar with that one? I'm not. I'm not. I haven't heard of Dr. Nelson. Yeah, the Emotion Code is a really interesting one. It's a lot simpler than the EFT, so it might be one to look into.

EFT, Emotion Code, and Ways to Connect 22:00

I will. Thank you for the tip. Yeah, it's been an amazing conversation. How, if there are any listeners that want to work with you personally or want to learn more about you, where can they go and when they work with you? Well, thank you for that opportunity. First and foremost, you can Google me, Dr. John McRaehl, and you'll find my Google page. And on it is all the information you need to reach me. You can email me, you can call me, my phone number is published, and I answer all inquiries personally.

I don't have my people do it. So if somebody reaches out and has questions, I always offer complimentary consultations. So I have a YouTube channel, Dr. John McGreal, there's tons of content on that about all of this that we're talking about, not just specifically cancer related, but the mind body dynamic and how it all works. I have a series called a better you in a minute or two on YouTube channel. It's also my new book, which is in process now. And I can be reached through email. I can be reached via telephone and I will give you a personal response.

My website is, I have two, Hypnotherapy Los Angeles, which is where I used to be based in Los Angeles. One big word, HypnotherapyLosAngeles.com. Tons of content about hypnosis and how it works. DrJohnMcGrale.com is my other one that's more geared toward. My group work with keynotes and motivational seminars and whatnot. And I'm always willing if anybody wants to have an audience addressed about the mind-body dynamic, I love to go out and do that. So yes, I'm easily reachable and I invite anybody who's curious to reach out and we can have a chat and I'll tell you what I know.

Dr. John McGrill, thank you so much for coming and it's been an amazing conversation and great to get to know you better and look forward to working with you in the future. Well, Dr. Lemon, thank you very much. It's been a delight to join you today, and I look forward to working with you in the future. It seems to me we can probably cross-refer beautifully. Thank you so much. Hey, take care. Hey guys, I'm on a mission to touch the lives of over 10,000 cancer patients this year, and I want you to join me in this cause.

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