DATE: Saturday, March 29, 1997              TAG: 9703280092

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PAM STARR, staff writer 

                                            LENGTH:  183 lines

THE PAIN KILLERTHIS MARINE-TURNED-HYPNOTHERAPIST ENDURES SURGERY WITHOUT ANESTHESIA - AND HE CLAIMS YOU COULD, TOO

Soothing music plays softly in the background as Joseph Hess reclines in the dentist's chair.

His face is heavily wrapped except for his mouth and nostrils and his breathing is deep and slow. The oral surgeon picks up a scalpel and slices across Hess's gums.

Hess has refused anesthesia. Still, he doesn't flinch. As the blood squirts over his gums, Hess is asked to help slow the flow. Heavily into a hypnotic trance, he complies. The flow diminishes to a trickle.

``Indeed, he is helping us,'' marvels Cmdr. Rod Rogge, who is performing the surgery at the Naval dental clinic at Little Creek. ``That looks good. Master gunnery Hess has an excellent healing response.''

Why anyone would chose to undergo invasive surgery without painkillers is beyond the comprehension of Dr. Kent S. Gore, a prosthodontist specialist who performed the first stage of Hess's implant surgery six months before the second surgery in June 1996. Then, Gore inserted two 1 1/4-inch titanium screws in Hess's front gums - without anesthesia.

``I had never seen anything like that before,'' recalls Gore, who was also on hand for the second surgery, in which Dr. Rogge chipped away at bone growth around the screws and resculptured the previous work. ``I've never known a patient who had the ability to control bleeding and pain. To be able to undergo those procedures without anesthesia is pretty amazing.''

Hess, 50, is not your typical patient. For starters, he's a retired Marine Corps master gunnery sergeant and drill instructor with 30 years of service.

Last year, he traded in his macho grunt image to become a full-time certified clinical hypnotherapist.

His purpose in life now, he'll tell you, is to show the world that we have dominion over our pain - whether it be emotional, mental or physical - through progressive relaxation and self-hypnosis.

People like Hess who have been cured of their afflictions are only too eager to share their story with others. Hess, a loquacious man with a raspy voice and a powerful build, is no different.

Six years ago, Hess woke up one morning paralyzed from the waist down. A doctor told him that several breaks in the bones of his feet were causing a pinching of the sciatic nerve and advised surgery to scrape the bones clean. Hess thought that would create a worse problem and said ``no.''

But he was up for re-enlistment. The doctor said Hess was medically unfit and told him to retire. Hess, not one to give up, asked if there was anything he could do personally to control the pain.

``The doctor started listing alternatives to pain control like acupuncture and hypnosis,'' says Hess in his Ocean Lakes home. ``So I decided to look into hypnosis.''

Hess enrolled in an intensive three-week course on hypnotherapy and graduated at the top of his class. Hess was a natural. That was in 1991. Since then, Hess says, he has not taken any medication nor does he suffer from headaches, backaches or any kind of strain.

``I'm a totally different person now than I was back then,'' he says. ``I'm not driven like I used to be. I'm more laid back. Hypnosis really turned my life around.''

Hess became involved in hypnosis - unknowingly - much earlier.

While playing high school football in California, he broke his arm and continued playing the rest of the season without getting it set. That was Hess's first brush with self-hypnosis, because he learned to ignore the pain, he says.

As a sniper in Vietnam, Hess also incorporated hypnosis as a self-preservation measure.

``You see your buddies' heads get blown off one minute and you're having a drink later that night,'' he explains. ``Vietnam was not physically or psychologically damaging to me because I was able to numb my mind.''

He says the Marines, and every branch of the armed forces, uses formal induction of hypnosis to train raw recruits.

``One formal kind of induction is shock and fear,'' he says with a wry smile. ``But you can't get the Marines to admit that.''

After Vietnam, Hess was sent to Africa for embassy duty. His specialty was nuclear, biological and chemical warfare defense, but he taught Total Quality Leadership from 1972 until his retirement in 1996.

Half of his 30 years in the Marines were spent in Japan. In 1978, Hess married a Japanese woman, Masako, 12 years his senior, and became a stepfather to her four children.

Now, Masako suffers from Parkinson's disease. Hess does all the cleaning and cooking and uses hypnotherapy and progressive relaxation on his wife three hours a day to try to halt the progression of the disease. So far, he has seen only a little improvement but is optimistic.

``I met Masako six months after arriving in Japan,'' he says. ``I was 33 years old when I married her and didn't know the first thing about being a husband or a father. I had some issues I needed to work through.''

Hess also tries to help his three sisters deal with their diseases through self-hypnosis. All of them live in Oregon. His oldest sister, Yvonne, has multiple sclerosis. Another sister, Judy, has Bell's Palsy. The youngest, Carolyn, had a pituitary tumor but has been asymptomatic for two years. He's not trying to cure them but is simply trying to help them cope.

``I've taught them all to relax, and it has helped,'' he says. ``But Yvonne's husband thinks I'm the devil.''

That kind of thinking really irks Hess, who calls himself a Christian hypnotherapist. He agrees that it sounds like a contradiction in terms but emphasizes that hypnosis is not against religion.

To prove that point, Hess shows off his 1990 undergraduate psychology degree from Chaminade University, a Catholic school in Honolulu. But the real eye-opener is the master's degree in professional counseling he earned from Liberty University in 1996.

Yes, that's the Rev. Jerry Falwell's school. Hess says he was fully accepted there. Hess has even given a lecture at Regent University called ``Relaxation for Christians.''

``There are a lot of ignorant preachers out there who say, ``Don't do that,' '' says Hess, a member of the American Association of Christian Counselors. ``Nowhere in the Bible does it say that hypnosis is wrong.

``I tell clients I'm a Christian right up front, because it might be negative for them,'' he adds. ``I will speak from my Christian basis.''

Hess just started taking on paying clients last year and only made about $1,000. But that's all right. His driving force, he says, is to enable everybody to learn what he has learned.

That's why Hess teaches free relaxation workshops at the Virginia Beach Central Library every month. That's why you can call his voice mail for free recorded information - teasers, he calls them - on how to stop smoking or how to increase your athletic performance or cure the willies brought on by public speaking.

Either way, Hess wants his potential clients to ``empower'' themselves, to take responsibility for their lives so they won't need him after a couple of sessions.

``I only work with behavioral problems, though,'' he says. ``I can't practice medicine or do anything a licensed mental health practitioner can do. If a client tells me he is being treated by someone, I have to get a referral.''

At one of his free relaxation workshops earlier this month, Hess taught eight people how to progressively relax their muscles. But by the time he was ready to lead them into hypnosis, only four remained. The workshops last three hours.

Hess acknowledges that sometimes his enthusiasm for the subject can overwhelm people. He likes to talk, he admits, and can go on for hours.

``That doesn't bother me that they left,'' he says. ``The one girl who came in with a headache left without one.''

Although his main goal is to help people in general learn to relax, Hess has other dreams he hopes to realize.

He wants to go to the Olympics to be a ``mind coach,'' helping athletes visualize success and then achieve it. Hess has some experience with that field, having taught members of the Marine Corps Rifle and Pistol Team visualization techniques and mental training from 1993 to 1996. He developed a two-hour hypnotic training tape that members would listen to before each match.

Rudy Dufour, the former coach of the team and a retired gunnery sergeant, said Hess's instruction is what helped the team win most of its matches during those years. Additionally, the Marine Security Force Battalion hadn't won the coveted Wirgman Trophy for shooting since 1956, but, thanks to Hess, won it in 1993, 1995 and 1996.

``You have the physical side of learning how to shoot, but then it's all mental,'' says Dufour. ``Anybody can line up and shoot, but to keep that positive mental attitude up there, no matter what the conditions are, well - that's the difference between a champion and another competitor.''

Hess would also like to use hypnosis as part of the space program at NASA. And to help special-education students.

Really, he wants everyone to know the value of hypnosis.

Back on the videotape of the second stage of his implant surgery, Hess lies motionless but is fully aware of what's going on.

A drill, with its shrill whirring, cuts through the upper flap of his hard palate to expose the implants.

Ouch. The noise alone is enough to send any adult scampering for cover, but Hess stays still, his breathing nice and easy.

Two hours later, Hess is laughing and joking with the staff, who appear to be a little dazed. That was last June, but Hess remembers every detail of the experience.

``I felt everything happening minus the pain,'' says Hess. ``It was very exciting. Fear is pain, and it's your choice to experience pain. But anyone can do what I do.''

Hess feels that's why he was led into a profession that doesn't have the best of reputations - to make hypnosis more acceptable to the masses.

``I've only met a couple of people who I thought were doing hypnosis for the wrong reasons,'' he says. ``You know, hypnosis is not magic. You can't make anyone do anything they don't want to.

``The bottom line is this: hypnosis is a God-given, natural ability that everyone has.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by D. Kevin Elliott

"Hypnosis is a God-given, natural ability that everyone has," says

Joseph Hess...

Color photos courtesy of Joseph Hess

ABOVE: Joseph Hess as a Marine in Vietnam in 1966...

LEFT: Hess with his wife, Masako, on their wedding day, June 6,

1978. KEYWORDS: PROFILE HYPNOSIS

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