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Dr. Elvira Lang is an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. She has been an interventional radiologist throughout most of her career, having previously held faculty positions at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa. Since observing how hypnosis enabled a panicked Vietnam veteran to lie down on the surgery table nearly two decades ago, she has dedicated her medical career to assuring that every patient who can benefit can have procedural hypnosis. Towards this goal, she built a substantive, federally funded research program and demonstrated in three large-scale prospective randomized studies with more than 700 patients that hypnosis on the procedure table reduces pain, anxiety, drug use, and complications. This work has provided much of the evidence-based foundation for widespread acceptance of procedural hypnosis.

As chief of the interventional radiology division and director of the Nonpharmacologic Analgesia Program at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Dr. Lang was able to develop a training methodology for busy health care professionals in settings where there is no time for extensive preparation and practice. Through her publications and efforts as past-president of the New England Society of Clinical Hypnosis and president-elect of the National Society of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, she has encouraged to include training in hypnosis for nurses and licensed healthcare professionals within the scope of their practice. In addition to her authorship of much of the research on procedural hypnosis, Dr. Lang has been featured extensively in the popular press and on television.

True to her commitment to "high tech - high touch," she was chief medical officer and vice president for a medical device start-up company, OmniSonics Medical Technologies, and has founded her own company Hypnalgesics, LLC, dedicated to the training of healthcare professionals in procedural hypnosis and communication for healthcare providers.