What makes me very cross is that people like to “debunk” so many things in the name of science, and with only shaky evidence in their favour. The more time I spend in the medical field, the more I realise I don’t know. I’ve already seen many things we knew to be “true” being completely turned on their head so I think it is extremely naive to think that we can say with absolute certainty that something doesn’t work. As for trials: I’ll have to refer back to the Cochrane collaboration again. They do the donkey work in bringing together all the studies and analysing them. Yes, at first glance, they say that nicotine replacement therapy works and that hypnotherapy isn’t proven in smoking cessation. However, and this is a big however, they looked at 132 trials for NRT with over 40,000 participants. For hypnotherapy they only managed to find 9 studies comparing it to 14 different control interventions and with significant heterogeneity in results. So are we surprised that NRT comes out better? Hardly! It’s far easier to find a statistically significant result with huge numbers and well constructed trials than with small numbers and studies which were all conducted slightly differently. Add to this the personal/therapist issues in hypnotherapy and it is difficult to make trials as black and white. Does it “prove” that it doesn’t work? NO! Not unless you conveniently ignore the numbers and statistics…

Which is what they did in the programme by giving examples of a handful of people. It makes nice TV of course to have a poor woman trying to give up chocolate and the guy who wants to give up the fags. But having only a few people, giving them different therapies, and then presenting this as a real example of whether or not the therapy as a whole is worthwhile is tremendously misleading. Maybe they stated that they weren’t claiming to prove anything with their examples, but does anybody at all believe that you would use someone’s story as an example if you did not want to convince the audience that something (in this case hypnosis is rubbish) is true?

Why must everything be conventional OR alternative, black OR white, good OR bad? It’s an oversimplification. Life isn’t that simple. Human beings aren’t that simple. And to aim to manipulate audiences with quasi scientific presentations is very disappointing….

Phew! Feel better now…. Back to being a cynical scientific type…

SHOCK HORROR – Professor hypnotises a colleague who seems to be genuinely hypnotised
SHOCK HORROR – Some people (unquantified) appear (ie not proven) to benefit (ie not to be cured) from hypnosis if they have IBS (which is generally accepted to be psychosomatic in the first place)

Can this programme get worse!

If hypnotherapy really works this programme certainly didn’t provide any scientific evidence; and if it doesn’t work the programme was positively misleading.

The BBC should be ashamed of themselves.

It seems that unless hypnosis is 100% effective for 100% of people, the press will continue to portray it as an end of the pier novelty and keep doing shows like this every so often. Why don’t the BBC do a similar show about all the supposed wonderful drugs on the market that don’t have a 100% success rate. Perhaps we should all start wearing white coats. Then we may get taken more seriously!

I was delighted to see the Police Force being progressive enough to use hypnosis and wrote about it some months ago, yet I could not understand why some other pieces of research were not cited to show the efficacy of hypnosis.

Of course I totally concur with you in one respect – hypnosis is not about relaxation. Yet the only time the presenter attempted to be hypnotised, she was nearly relaxed to death for the space of an hour… I’d have fallen asleep or got bored senseless!

I did not see any one subject in the show exhibiting any signs to indicate they were truly hypnotised.

What’s more, I gently disagree that ‘no claims were made’ – they claimed that hypnosis had no research to support any use in dealing with smokers or weight reduction clients… That is likely to influence anyone watching, is it not?

Jon, you and I are pals, but the show was a pile…

Thanks Sophie 🙂

The stage hypno was the worst thing because of the old can’t get people to do anything against their will which is rubbish, however I thought the rest was spot on. No claims were made and everything was left to the viewr to decide.

Brilliant show.