Force specific index disuse

[Steve Crawford <scrawford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Is there a way to force a specific index to be removed from 
consideration in planning a single query?

Specifically, on a 60-million-row table I have an index that is a 
candidate for removal. I have identified the sets of nightly queries 
that use the index but before dropping it I would like to run EXPLAIN 
and do timing tests on the queries to see the impact of not having that 
index available and rewrite the query to efficiently use other indexes 
if necessary.

Cheers,
Steve