"I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have diabetes. Here is a prescription for the medications you must take."

The patient walks away from the doctor’s office with a number of feelings: Anguish, confusion, anger, denial and in many cases a deep, sometimes hidden sense of despair and hopelessness.

This patient has just become part of a largely preventable epidemic. According to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 1990 and 1998, the total number of people in the U.S. with all types of diabetes jumped by roughly 33%.

Now, in 2002, in the U.S. alone it is estimated that there are 16 million people with diabetes and 17 million more at high risk. What does this mean to the practicing hypnotist? It means there are millions of people who need your complimentary services.

Our highly trained and dedicated medical practitioners do everything they can to help their patients but they are not trained to do for the patient what is crucially important: Help them to change their behavior. Nor should the doctor/nurse be expected to help in this area because this is the patient’s responsibility.

This brings us to the purpose of this column: How the hypnotist can responsibly assist a person with diabetes. This can be accomplished by helping them to positively alter their motivational/behavioral structure. Doing so will greatly increase the diabetic’s chances of more successfully managing and perhaps, improving their condition.

What you can expect in this article and in following articles is that you will be given powerful behavioral change information relating to diabetes and how it can help the diabetic client. For your information, I (CDH) was diagnosed in 1992 with Type 2 diabetes. I found out I had diabetes because I was going blind very quickly.

My doctor gave me the good news/bad news scenario. The good news is that I was in my ‘honeymoon’ phase. This meant oral medications (pills) versus shots. The bad news is that within 2 years I would be using insulin (shots!). After experiencing the emotions mentioned in the first paragraph, I started to use the tools and techniques of hypnosis.

These tools helped to alter my motivational structure in a manner that has had a significant, positive effect on the diabetic symptoms I was experiencing. For example, 10 years later my eyesight is now 20/20 and I am not taking shots.

Realize that at the very least, you can help a person with diabetes to make small but significant behavioral changes thus probably preventing some of the more horrifying consequences of diabetes.

So what can you do if you have little or no knowledge of this very serious medical condition? The first thing you can do is to help your client to find a more emotionally stable state of mind. You can hypnotically coach your client to use deep, calming breathing exercises.

When I was diagnosed with this disease it felt as if a baseball bat had been swung at the knees of my heart. I was emotionally crippled. Whenever I started to think about ‘my disease’ I was breathless with fear and despair. My body was reflecting my state of mind. Shallow breathing led to feeling light-headed and being unable to think constructively. Finally, I talked myself into exploring options.

The first thing I did was to hypnotically program myself to breathe in a calming manner. Please note the following results from a Duke University stress management study involving persons with diabetes:

"The stress management techniques, when added to standard care, helped reduce glucose levels," medical psychologist Richard Surwit of Duke, who led the study, said in a statement.

"There are many self-help books and other commercially available materials about stress management from which patients can learn these techniques."

By the way, please note that Surwit's team worked with 108 patients with type II or adult-onset diabetes. All the patients took part in five 30-minute educational sessions about diabetes.

PLEASE copy this information and make it available to anyone you know with diabetes because it will do the most important thing known in healing: Give realistic hope!

What else can you do right now for your client? Begin with a very powerful script: The Hartland Ego Strengthening Script. The NGH makes this powerful script a fundamental in their training.

Here’s the final point for this article: In his book, Reversing Diabetes, Julian Whitaker, M.D., states that diabetes is a condition—not a disease. This means that the person with diabetes has choice because a condition is controllable whereas a disease is devastating. Your job is to help the diabetic client to find their personal power over their condition.

What’s next? In the following articles you will be given the Seven Steps To Motivational Coaching for The Diabetic Client plus scripts and much more. Also, you will also learn more of the essential and easy to learn facts concerning diabetes.

Devin Hastings