As a follow-up to my post the other day (Hypnosis isn’t magic, but it can help you stop smoking), here’s another, more recent study again showing hypnotherapy to be more effective than medication for helping people stop smoking. (Thanks to Dave Sabat for drawing attention to it.)
This study was done in 2007, 15 years after the study I cited before, yet it states in its second sentence, “Hypnotherapy has been promoted as a method of smoking cessation, but reliability has not been confirmed.” It’s just as well I’m not a conspiracy theorist, really, or I’d start talking about suppression. I suspect it’s more like the “not invented here” effect, or the fact that drug companies have big marketing budgets and hypnotherapists don’t, or the association of hypnotherapy with “alternative” therapies which are regarded as scientifically suspect.
This is a much smaller study (67 people), so the results can’t be generalized with as much confidence, but I’ll point out a few things.
First, the patients got to choose which method they would use, and women were more likely to choose hypnotherapy, while men were more likely to choose quitting “cold turkey”. I’ve noticed myself that I see at least five female clients for every male client, and I’d really like to know why.
Second, the “control” (“cold turkey”) group wasn’t properly controlled; they received “brief counseling” but the others received “intensive counseling”.
Third, the patients who received hypnotherapy apparently had only one session, yet they still had a 50% quit rate as measured at 26 weeks after discharge from hospital.
Fourth, that quit rate was twice that of the control group and more than three times that of the drug group (who had nicotine replacement therapy). Nicotine replacement therapy, in this study, actually performed worse than control, even though the participants who had it also got more counseling than the control group. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that the methods were self-selected. People who chose to quit without drugs or hypnotherapy presumably believed that they could do so, whereas those who chose to use the drugs may not have taken as much personal responsibility or may not have had as much confidence in their ability to quit. I’d point out that in real life, as opposed to scientific trials, people do choose their own method of quitting.
Fifth, the quit rate for the group using hypnotherapy alone was exactly the same as the quit rate for the group getting both hypnotherapy and nicotine replacement therapy.
This is a small study, not randomly controlled, and the “control” condition was not well handled, so I would be hesitant to put too much weight on it. But it’s interesting.
(And whatever method you choose to use, you’ll find some good advice in my free ebook, How to Stop Smoking.)
NOTE: I’ve now moderated my anti-drug position as mentioned in my more recent post on Nicotine Replacement Therapy.
Technorati Tags: drugs, drug alternatives, hypnosis, hypnotherapy, quit smoking, smoking cessation, quitting, smoking, scientific study, nicotine replacement therapy
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