NTDTV • Published on Jun 18, 2014

A singer from Guinea is hypnotized, then told to sing during her surgery to protect her vocal chords in what is being called a first in medicine.

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It is being called a world's first in medicine.

Doctors at a hospital in Creteil, France removed thirty-one-year-old Alama Kante's potentially cancerous thyroid gland while she was hypnotized. The singer from Guinea was given only local anesthetic and asked to sing during the procedure. Two months later, now healed, she explains why.

Alama Kante: "I met with the anesthetist to know how it would go, all of that, and they called me afterwards to say 'No we are not going to do it because you have a professional job with your vocal cords, we can't take the risk of sending you to sleep and perform such an operation'. So they proposed hypnosis so that I sing, so the doctor knows where to find the vocal cords that he must not touch."

To cope with the pain, the hypnotist told her to imagine what she felt was that of childbirth and that she was in distant Africa.

Alama Kante: "It's an operation which happens as if you were in a dream, a dream which sends us very very far away, and at the time, conscious of what is happening."

Kante's choice of song was 'Tolong', with lyrics that were quite apropos: "Fight, never give up..."