Comments on: BBC1's Alternative Therapies — Hypnotherapy: What A Crock!

By: Adam Eason

Adam Eason — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:40:55 +0000

Peter, I certainly would never want to be accused of being sensible or running a sensible blog…

By: Gráinne

Gráinne — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:14:53 +0000

I’m soooo glad I turned over from this last night. It would have significantly interfered with my sleep! I had flicked over to the late night repeat and watched a little bit. I saw the presenter undergoing hypnosis but was really irritated by the little bit I saw. She seemed to go into it with the aim of not feeling anything or falling for it. She wanted to prove it all wrong and not let go. It seemed like she was focusing more on what she wasn’t feeling than what she was. And the guy supposedly hypnotising her was appalling. He seemed to be skipping all over the place with no message or aim. And only too delighted to almost side with her afterwards saying that he wasn’t very suggestible either. As if that’s a good thing. Grrr!

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…

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:17:34 +0000

Just watched some more:

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!

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:46:33 +0000

Well, for a moment there I thought I had found a sensible blog. I too was appalled at the programme – but for exactly the opposite reason. The apparent “evidence” for hypnotherapy was simply anecdotal – it wasn’t evidence for or against anything. The sight of teeth being pulled under hypnotherapy is the same (there are lots of anecdotes of people having teeth pulled with no anaesthetic at all). There was no systematic analysis of hypnotherapy compaed to anything else (or compared to nothing at all)
Basically a load of non-scientific claptrap. How can a scientist call “amazing” the behaviour of a silly women who thinks she has been “genuinely effected” by the words of a hypnotherapist!

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.

By: Lee Shuttlewood

Lee Shuttlewood — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:51:10 +0000

What annoyed me about the show was that they expected Hypnosis to be the all or nothing answer to everything. When looking at the evidence for using Hypnosis with smoking cessation the phrase If I recall was “It sometimes works, but only with counselling or discussion too”. Well of course! We don’t just pull the client in, swing the watch, tell them they don’t smoke and send them on their merry way! We have to find out about their smoking habits so that the session is customised to their needs to ensure the hypnosis is correctly applied to the relevant areas of that persons habit. Same for the chocolate. They showed Elliot doing a quick demo which was effective, but the fact the woman had eaten chocolate a few weeks later was shown as a failure on the part of hypnosis. I wonder how much chocolate she used to eat before she was hypnotised. She freely admitted that chocolate had lost it’s buzz for her. To me that is a perfect result!

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!