How Much Can Hypnotherapy Really Do?

Sit Back, Relax, And…

In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you for your opinions of hypnotherapy, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:

• About 58% said “It is a good, evidenced-based practice that can help alleviate many conditions”
• Exactly 25% said “It is a scam and sham and/or wishful thinking at best, and should be avoided by all”
• About 13% said “It works only for those who are particularly suggestible—but it does work for them”
• One (1) person said “It is useful only for brain-centric conditions e.g. addictions, anxiety, phobias, etc”

So what does the science say?

Hypnotherapy is all in the patient’s head: True or False?

True! But guess which part of your body controls much of the rest of it.

So while hypnotherapy may be “all in the head”, its effects are not.

Since placebo effect, nocebo effect, and psychosomatic effect in general are well-documented, it’s quite safe to say at the very least that hypnotherapy thus “may be useful”.

Which prompts the question…

Hypnotherapy is just placebo: True or False?

False, probably. At the very least, if it’s placebo, it’s an unusually effective placebo.

And yes, even though testing against placebo is considered a good method of doing randomized controlled trials, some placebos are definitely better than others. If a placebo starts giving results much better than other placebos, is it still a placebo? Possibly a philosophical question whose answer may be rooted in semantics, but happily we do have a more useful answer…

Here’s an interesting paper which: a) begins its abstract with the strong, unequivocal statement “Hypnosis has proven clinical utility”, and b) goes on to examine the changes in neural activity during hypnosis:

Brain Activity and Functional Connectivity Associated with Hypnosis

It works only for the very suggestible: True or False?

False, broadly. As with any medical and/or therapeutic procedure, a patient’s expectations can affect the treatment outcome.

And, especially worthy of note, a patient’s level of engagement will vastly affect it treatment that has patient involvement. So for example, if a doctor prescribes a patient pills, which the patient does not think will work, so the patient takes them intermittently, because they’re slow to get the prescription refilled, etc, then surprise, the pills won’t get as good results (since they’re often not being taken).

How this plays out in hypnotherapy: because hypnotherapy is a guided process, part of its efficacy relies on the patient following instructions. If the hypnotherapist guides the patient’s mind, and internally the patient is just going “nope nope nope, what a lot of rubbish” then of course it will not work, just like if you ask for directions in the street and then ignore them, you won’t get to where you want to be.

For those who didn’t click on the above link by the way, you might want to go back and have a look at it, because it included groups of individuals with “high/low hypnotizability” per several ways of scoring such.

It works only for brain-centric things, e.g. addictions, anxieties, phobias, etc: True or False?

False—but it is better at those. Here for example is the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists’ information page, and if you go to “What conditions can hypnotherapy help to treat”, you’ll see two broad categories; the first is almost entirely brain-stuff; the second is more varied, and includes pain relief of various kinds, burn care, cancer treatment side effects, and even menopause symptoms. Finally, warts and other various skin conditions get their own (positive) mention, per “this is possible through the positive effects hypnosis has on the immune system”:

RCPsych | Hypnosis And Hypnotherapy

Wondering how much psychosomatic effect can do?

You might like this previous article; it’s not about hypnotherapy, but it is about the difference the mind can make on physical markers of aging:

Aging, Counterclockwise: When Age Is A Flexible Number

Take care!