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How Much Can Hypnotherapy Really Do?
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Sit Back, Relax, And…
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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!
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Glutathione: More Than An Antioxidant
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Glutathione’s Benefits: The Usual And The Unique
Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant that does all the things we might reasonably expect an antioxidant to do, plus some beneficial quirks of its own.
We do make glutathione in our bodies, but we can also get it from our diet, and of course, we can also supplement it.
What foods is it in?
It’s in a lot of foods, but some top examples include:
- turmeric
- avocado
- asparagus
- almonds
- cruciferous vegetables
- watermelon
- garlic
For a fuller list and discussion, see:
What does it do?
Let’s start with the obvious; as with most things that are antioxidant, it is also anti-inflammatory. Increasing or decreasing glutathione levels is associated with decreased or increased inflammation, respectively. For example:
It being anti-inflammatory also means it can be beneficial in calming autoimmune disorders:
Glutathione: a key player in autoimmunity
And to complete the triad of “those three things that generally go together”, yes, this means it also has anticancer potential, but watch out!
❝Although in healthy cells [glutathione] is crucial for the removal and detoxification of carcinogens, elevated [glutathione] levels in tumor cells are associated with tumor progression and increased resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs❞
~ Dr. Miroslava Cuperlovic-Culf et al.
Read in full: Role of Glutathione in Cancer: From Mechanisms to Therapies
So in other words, when it comes to cancer risk management, glutathione is a great preventative, but the opposite of a cure.
What were those “beneficial quirks of its own”?
They are mainly twofold, and the first is that it improves insulin sensitivity. There are many studies showing this, but here’s a recent one from earlier this year:
The Role of Glutathione and Its Precursors in Type 2 Diabetes
The other main “beneficial quirk of its own” is that it helps prevent and/or reverse non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, as in this study from last year:
Because of glutathione’s presence in nuts, fruits, and vegetables, this makes it a great thing to work in tandem with a dietary approach to preventing/reversing NAFLD, by the way:
Anything else?
It’s being investigated as a potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease symptoms, but the science is young for this one, so there is no definitive recommendation yet in this case. If you’re interested in that, though, do check out the current state of the science at:
Potential use of glutathione as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease
Is it safe?
While there is no 100% blanket statement of safety that can ever be made about anything (even water can kill people, and oxygen ultimately kills everyone that something else doesn’t get first), glutathione has one of the safest general safety profiles possible, with the exception we noted earlier (if you have cancer, it is probably better to skip this one unless an oncologist or similar advises you otherwise).
As ever, do speak with your doctor/pharmacist to be sure in any case, though!
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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Rapid Rise in Syphilis Hits Native Americans Hardest
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From her base in Gallup, New Mexico, Melissa Wyaco supervises about two dozen public health nurses who crisscross the sprawling Navajo Nation searching for patients who have tested positive for or been exposed to a disease once nearly eradicated in the U.S.: syphilis.
Infection rates in this region of the Southwest — the 27,000-square-mile reservation encompasses parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah — are among the nation’s highest. And they’re far worse than anything Wyaco, who is from Zuni Pueblo (about 40 miles south of Gallup) and is the nurse consultant for the Navajo Area Indian Health Service, has seen in her 30-year nursing career.
Syphilis infections nationwide have climbed rapidly in recent years, reaching a 70-year high in 2022, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That rise comes amid a shortage of penicillin, the most effective treatment. Simultaneously, congenital syphilis — syphilis passed from a pregnant person to a baby — has similarly spun out of control. Untreated, congenital syphilis can cause bone deformities, severe anemia, jaundice, meningitis, and even death. In 2022, the CDC recorded 231 stillbirths and 51 infant deaths caused by syphilis, out of 3,761 congenital syphilis cases reported that year.
And while infections have risen across the U.S., no demographic has been hit harder than Native Americans. The CDC data released in January shows that the rate of congenital syphilis among American Indians and Alaska Natives was triple the rate for African Americans and nearly 12 times the rate for white babies in 2022.
“This is a disease we thought we were going to eradicate not that long ago, because we have a treatment that works really well,” said Meghan Curry O’Connell, a member of the Cherokee Nation and chief public health officer at the Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board, who is based in South Dakota.
Instead, the rate of congenital syphilis infections among Native Americans (644.7 cases per 100,000 people in 2022) is now comparable to the rate for the entire U.S. population in 1941 (651.1) — before doctors began using penicillin to cure syphilis. (The rate fell to 6.6 nationally in 1983.)
O’Connell said that’s why the Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board and tribal leaders from North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa have asked federal Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to declare a public health emergency in their states. A declaration would expand staffing, funding, and access to contact tracing data across their region.
“Syphilis is deadly to babies. It’s highly infectious, and it causes very severe outcomes,” O’Connell said. “We need to have people doing boots-on-the-ground work” right now.
In 2022, New Mexico reported the highest rate of congenital syphilis among states. Primary and secondary syphilis infections, which are not passed to infants, were highest in South Dakota, which had the second-highest rate of congenital syphilis in 2022. In 2021, the most recent year for which demographic data is available, South Dakota had the second-worst rate nationwide (after the District of Columbia) — and numbers were highest among the state’s large Native population.
In an October news release, the New Mexico Department of Health noted that the state had “reported a 660% increase in cases of congenital syphilis over the past five years.” A year earlier, in 2017, New Mexico reported only one case — but by 2020, that number had risen to 43, then to 76 in 2022.
Starting in 2020, the covid-19 pandemic made things worse. “Public health across the country got almost 95% diverted to doing covid care,” said Jonathan Iralu, the Indian Health Service chief clinical consultant for infectious diseases, who is based at the Gallup Indian Medical Center. “This was a really hard-hit area.”
At one point early in the pandemic, the Navajo Nation reported the highest covid rate in the U.S. Iralu suspects patients with syphilis symptoms may have avoided seeing a doctor for fear of catching covid. That said, he doesn’t think it’s fair to blame the pandemic for the high rates of syphilis, or the high rates of women passing infections to their babies during pregnancy, that continue four years later.
Native Americans are more likely to live in rural areas, far from hospital obstetric units, than any other racial or ethnic group. As a result, many do not receive prenatal care until later in pregnancy, if at all. That often means providers cannot test and treat patients for syphilis before delivery.
In New Mexico, 23% of patients did not receive prenatal care until the fifth month of pregnancy or later, or received fewer than half the appropriate number of visits for the infant’s gestational age in 2023 (the national average is less than 16%).
Inadequate prenatal care is especially risky for Native Americans, who have a greater chance than other ethnic groups of passing on a syphilis infection if they become pregnant. That’s because, among Native communities, syphilis infections are just as common in women as in men. In every other ethnic group, men are at least twice as likely to contract syphilis, largely because men who have sex with men are more susceptible to infection. O’Connell said it’s not clear why women in Native communities are disproportionately affected by syphilis.
“The Navajo Nation is a maternal health desert,” said Amanda Singer, a Diné (Navajo) doula and lactation counselor in Arizona who is also executive director of the Navajo Breastfeeding Coalition/Diné Doula Collective. On some parts of the reservation, patients have to drive more than 100 miles to reach obstetric services. “There’s a really high number of pregnant women who don’t get prenatal care throughout the whole pregnancy.”
She said that’s due not only to a lack of services but also to a mistrust of health care providers who don’t understand Native culture. Some also worry that providers might report patients who use illicit substances during their pregnancies to the police or child welfare. But it’s also because of a shrinking network of facilities: Two of the Navajo area’s labor and delivery wards have closed in the past decade. According to a recent report, more than half of U.S. rural hospitals no longer offer labor and delivery services.
Singer and the other doulas in her network believe New Mexico and Arizona could combat the syphilis epidemic by expanding access to prenatal care in rural Indigenous communities. Singer imagines a system in which midwives, doulas, and lactation counselors are able to travel to families and offer prenatal care “in their own home.”
O’Connell added that data-sharing arrangements between tribes and state, federal, and IHS offices vary widely across the country, but have posed an additional challenge to tackling the epidemic in some Native communities, including her own. Her Tribal Epidemiology Center is fighting to access South Dakota’s state data.
In the Navajo Nation and surrounding area, Iralu said, IHS infectious disease doctors meet with tribal officials every month, and he recommends that all IHS service areas have regular meetings of state, tribal, and IHS providers and public health nurses to ensure every pregnant person in those areas has been tested and treated.
IHS now recommends all patients be tested for syphilis yearly, and tests pregnant patients three times. It also expanded rapid and express testing and started offering DoxyPEP, an antibiotic that transgender women and men who have sex with men can take up to 72 hours after sex and that has been shown to reduce syphilis transmission by 87%. But perhaps the most significant change IHS has made is offering testing and treatment in the field.
Today, the public health nurses Wyaco supervises can test and treat patients for syphilis at home — something she couldn’t do when she was one of them just three years ago.
“Why not bring the penicillin to the patient instead of trying to drag the patient in to the penicillin?” said Iralu.
It’s not a tactic IHS uses for every patient, but it’s been effective in treating those who might pass an infection on to a partner or baby.
Iralu expects to see an expansion in street medicine in urban areas and van outreach in rural areas, in coming years, bringing more testing to communities — as well as an effort to put tests in patients’ hands through vending machines and the mail.
“This is a radical departure from our past,” he said. “But I think that’s the wave of the future.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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Healthy Tiramisu
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Tiramisu (literally “pick-me-up”, “tira-mi-su”) is a delightful dish that, in its traditional form, is also a trainwreck for the health, being loaded with inflammatory cream and sugar, not to mention the cholesterol content. Here we recreate the dish in healthy fashion, being loaded with protein, fiber, and healthy fats, not to mention that the optional sweetener is an essential amino acid. The coffee and cocoa, of course, are full of antioxidants too. All in all, what’s not celebrate?
You will need
- 2 cups silken tofu (no need to press it) (do not substitute with any other kind of tofu or it will not work)
- 1 cup oat cream (you can buy this ready-made, or make it yourself by blending oats in water until you get the desired consistency) (you can also just use dairy cream, but that will be less healthy)
- 1 cup almond flour (also simply called “ground almonds”)
- 1 cup espresso ristretto, or otherwise the strongest black coffee you have facility to make
- ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder, plus more for dusting
- 1 pack savoiardi biscuits, also called “ladyfinger” biscuits (this was the only part we couldn’t make healthy—if you figure out a way to make it healthy, let us know!) (if vegan, obviously use a vegan substitute biscuit; this writer uses Lotus/Biscoff biscuits, which work well)
- 1 tsp vanilla essence
- ½ tsp almond essence
- Optional: glycine, per taste
- Garnish: roasted coffee beans
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Add glycine to the coffee first if you want the overall dish to be sweeter. Glycine has approximately the same sweetness as sugar, and can be used as a 1:1 substitution. Use that information as you see fit.
2) Blend the tofu and the cream together in a high-speed blender until smooth. It should have a consistency like cake-batter; if it is too liquidy, add small amounts of almond flour until it is thicker. If it’s too thick, add oat cream until it isn’t. If you want it to be sweeter than it is, add glycine to taste. When happy with its taste and consistency, divide it evenly into two bowls.
3) Add the vanilla essence and almond essence to one bowl, and the cocoa powder to the other, mixing well (in a food processor, or just by using a whisk)
4) Coat the base of a glass dish (such as a Pyrex oven dish, but any dish is fine, and any glass dish will allow for viewing the pretty layers we’ll be making) with a very thin layer of almond flour (if you want sweetness there, you can mix some glycine in with the almond flour first).
4) One by one, soak the biscuits briefly in the coffee, and use them to line to base of the dish.
5) Add a thin layer of chocolate cream, ensuring the surface is as flat as possible. Dust it with cocoa powder, to increase the surface tension.
6) Add a thin layer of vanilla-and-almond cream, ensuring the surface is as flat as possible. Dust it with cocoa powder, to increase the surface tension.
7) Stop and assess: do you have enough ingredients left to repeat these layers? It will depend on the size and shape dish you used. If you do, repeat them, finishing with a vanilla-and-almond cream layer.
8) Dust the final layer with cocoa powder if you haven’t already, and add the coffee bean garnish, if using.
9) Refrigerate for at least 8 hours, and if you have time to prepare it the day before you will eat it, that is best of all.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Easily Digestible Vegetarian Protein Sources
- Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
- The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)
- The Sweet Truth About Glycine
- Tiramisu Crunch Bites ← craving tiramisu but not keen on all that effort? Enjoy these!
Take care!
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Stress Resets – by Dr. Jennifer Taitz
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You may be thinking: “that’s a bold claim in the subtitle; does the book deliver?”
And yes, yes it does.
The “resets” themselves are divided into categories:
- Mind resets, which are mostly CBT,
- Body resets, which include assorted somatic therapies such as vagus nerve resets, the judicious use of ice-water, what 1-minute sprints of exercise can do for your mental state, and why not to use the wrong somatic therapy for the wrong situation!
- Behavior resets, which are more about the big picture, and not falling into common traps.
What common traps, you ask? This is about how we often have maladaptive responses to stress, e.g. we’re short of money so we overspend, we have an important deadline so we over-research and procrastinate, we’re anxious so we hyperfixate on the problem, we’re grieving so we look to substances to try to cope, we’re exhausted so we stay up late to try to claw back some lost time. Things where our attempt to cope actually makes things worse for us.
Instead, Dr. Taitz advises us of how to get ourselves from “knowing we shouldn’t do that” to actually not doing that, and how to respond more healthily to stress, how to turn general stress into eustress, or as she puts it, how to “turn your knots into bows”.
The style is… “Academic light”, perhaps we could say. It’s a step above pop-science, but a step below pure academic literature, which does make it a very pleasant read as well as informative. There are often footnotes at the bottom of each page to bridge any knowledge-gap, and for those who want to know the evidence of these evidence-based approaches, she does provide 35 pages of hard science sources to back up her claims.
Bottom line: if you’d like to learn how better to manage stress from an evidence-based perspective that’s not just “do minfdulness meditation”, then this book gives a lot of ways.
Click here to check out Stress Resets, and indeed soothe your body and mind in minutes!
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What Is Making The Ringing In Your Ears Worse?
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Dr. Rachael Cook, an audiologist at Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona, shares her professional insights into managing tinnitus.
If you’re unfamiliar with Tinnitus, it is an auditory condition characterized by a ringing, buzzing, or humming sound, and ffects nearly 10% of the population. We’ve written on Tinnitus, and how it can disrupt your life, in this article.
Key Triggers for Tinnitus
Several everyday habits can make your tinnitus louder. Caffeine and nicotine increase blood pressure, restricting blood flow to the cochlea and worsening tinnitus. Common medications, such as pain relievers, high-dose antibiotics, and antidepressants, can also exacerbate tinnitus, especially with higher or long-term dosages.
Impact of Diet and Sleep
Dietary choices significantly impact tinnitus. Alcohol and salt alter the fluid balance in the cochlea, increasing tinnitus perception. Alcohol changes blood flow patterns and neurotransmitter production, while high salt intake has similar effects. Poor sleep quality elevates stress levels, making it harder to ignore tinnitus signals. Addressing sleep disorders like sleep apnea and insomnia can help manage tinnitus symptoms.
Importance of Treating Hearing Loss
Untreated hearing loss worsens tinnitus. Nearly 90% of individuals with tinnitus have some hearing loss. Hearing aids can reduce tinnitus perception by restoring missing sounds and reducing the brain’s internal compensatory signals. Combining hearing aids with sound therapy is said to provide even greater relief.
Read more about hearing loss in our article on the topic.
Otherwise, for a great guide on managing tinnitus, we recommend watching Dr. Cook’s video:
Here’s hoping your ear’s aren’t ringing too much whilst watching the video!
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What’s the difference between vegan and vegetarian?
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What’s the difference? is a new editorial product that explains the similarities and differences between commonly confused health and medical terms, and why they matter.
Vegan and vegetarian diets are plant-based diets. Both include plant foods, such as fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains.
But there are important differences, and knowing what you can and can’t eat when it comes to a vegan and vegetarian diet can be confusing.
So, what’s the main difference?
Creative Cat Studio/Shutterstock What’s a vegan diet?
A vegan diet is an entirely plant-based diet. It doesn’t include any meat and animal products. So, no meat, poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy or honey.
What’s a vegetarian diet?
A vegetarian diet is a plant-based diet that generally excludes meat, poultry, fish and seafood, but can include animal products. So, unlike a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet can include eggs, dairy and honey.
But you may be wondering why you’ve heard of vegetarians who eat fish, vegetarians who don’t eat eggs, vegetarians who don’t eat dairy, and even vegetarians who eat some meat. Well, it’s because there are variations on a vegetarian diet:
- a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet excludes meat, poultry, fish and seafood, but includes eggs, dairy and honey
- an ovo-vegetarian diet excludes meat, poultry, fish, seafood and dairy, but includes eggs and honey
- a lacto-vegetarian diet excludes meat, poultry, fish, seafood and eggs, but includes dairy and honey
- a pescatarian diet excludes meat and poultry, but includes eggs, dairy, honey, fish and seafood
- a flexitarian, or semi-vegetarian diet, includes eggs, dairy and honey and may include small amounts of meat, poultry, fish and seafood.
Are these diets healthy?
A 2023 review looked at the health effects of vegetarian and vegan diets from two types of study.
Observational studies followed people over the years to see how their diets were linked to their health. In these studies, eating a vegetarian diet was associated with a lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease (such as heart disease or a stroke), diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), dementia and cancer.
For example, in a study of 44,561 participants, the risk of heart disease was 32% lower in vegetarians than non-vegetarians after an average follow-up of nearly 12 years.
Further evidence came from randomised controlled trials. These instruct study participants to eat a specific diet for a specific period of time and monitor their health throughout. These studies showed eating a vegetarian or vegan diet led to reductions in weight, blood pressure, and levels of unhealthy cholesterol.
For example, one analysis combined data from seven randomised controlled trials. This so-called meta-analysis included data from 311 participants. It showed eating a vegetarian diet was associated with a systolic blood pressure (the first number in your blood pressure reading) an average 5 mmHg lower compared with non-vegetarian diets.
It seems vegetarian diets are more likely to be healthier, across a number of measures.
For example, a 2022 meta-analysis combined the results of several observational studies. It concluded a vegetarian diet, rather than vegan diet, was recommended to prevent heart disease.
There is also evidence vegans are more likely to have bone fractures than vegetarians. This could be partly due to a lower body-mass index and a lower intake of nutrients such as calcium, vitamin D and protein.
But it can be about more than just food
Many vegans, where possible, do not use products that directly or indirectly involve using animals.
So vegans would not wear leather, wool or silk clothing, for example. And they would not use soaps or candles made from beeswax, or use products tested on animals.
The motivation for following a vegan or vegetarian diet can vary from person to person. Common motivations include health, environmental, ethical, religious or economic reasons.
And for many people who follow a vegan or vegetarian diet, this forms a central part of their identity.
More than a diet: veganism can form part of someone’s identity. Shutterstock So, should I adopt a vegan or vegetarian diet?
If you are thinking about a vegan or vegetarian diet, here are some things to consider:
- eating more plant foods does not automatically mean you are eating a healthier diet. Hot chips, biscuits and soft drinks can all be vegan or vegetarian foods. And many plant-based alternatives, such as plant-based sausages, can be high in added salt
- meeting the nutrient intake targets for vitamin B12, iron, calcium, and iodine requires more careful planning while on a vegan or vegetarian diet. This is because meat, seafood and animal products are good sources of these vitamins and minerals
- eating a plant-based diet doesn’t necessarily mean excluding all meat and animal products. A healthy flexitarian diet prioritises eating more whole plant-foods, such as vegetables and beans, and less processed meat, such as bacon and sausages
- the Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend eating a wide variety of foods from the five food groups (fruit, vegetables, cereals, lean meat and/or their alternatives and reduced-fat dairy products and/or their alternatives). So if you are eating animal products, choose lean, reduced-fat meats and dairy products and limit processed meats.
Katherine Livingstone, NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Deakin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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