Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

As humans, we are always telling stories to ourselves and each other. Here are a few stories I’ve collected from round the net recently. (I’ve rephrased the first one for brevity, but you can check the original sources I’ve linked.)

Man in a pub: “Hypnosis doesn’t work, eh? It helped my wife lose weight, so she told my mate’s wife and she made him listen to some stop-smoking tapes but it didn’t do anything for him.”
“Did he want to stop smoking?”
“Nah, it was just her. It’s all nonsense.”

College woman interviewed for campus newspaper, on being hypnotized by her date’s father with a spinning miniature disco ball on the night of her junior prom: “We were complaining about how our dresses fit and he said he could help us lose a few pounds. The only thing it did was make me sleepy, and it definitely didn’t work; I ballooned my senior year.”

Artist commenting on a “dream machine” he’d filmed, after admitting he was probably too busy filming it to immerse himself in the experience: “After all, if hypnotism really worked, hypnotists would rule the world…”

Underlying these three stories is another, unexamined story, one of the most common hypnosis myths: “Hypnosis is supposed to be a magical power that enables the hypnotist to make anyone do anything he wants.” This is why people will believe that someone in Italy robbed a random supermarket teller using hypnosis and she didn’t remember anything afterwards. And this is why, when they experience hypnosis not having magical results regardless of conditions, they say, “Oh, it doesn’t work.”

I have to say, there are apparently plenty of charlatans around, on and off the stage, who are fostering the impression that hypnosis is magic and does work like that. I’m not going to boost their Technorati authority by linking to them, but there are numerous advocates of “conversational hypnosis” around the net who make ridiculous claims that you can seduce anyone and sell anything to anyone, and all just by (paying them large amounts of money and) learning their secret techniques of what words to say and how to say them. As if it was magic.

A man rang me the other day looking for some magic (at least, that’s my interpretation). He kept asking if I could guarantee that if they came and saw me, he and his partner could stop smoking. I told him, no, I’m under a code of ethics that specifically forbids me from guaranteeing that, because no therapy works for absolutely everyone. Dave Sabat has posted recently at length about guarantees and hypnotherapy, so I won’t repeat what he says. But here’s my favourite story about the effectiveness of hypnotherapy for smoking.

photo credit: madmetal

Once upon a time, Chockalingam Viswesvaran and Frank L. Schmidt analysed over 600 scientific studies involving almost 72,000 participants from the USA, Canada, England, France and several Scandinavian countries. The studies assessed the proportion of participants who had completely given up smoking, and included 48 studies where hypnotherapy (in some form, varying from “simple suggestions to a complex sequence of imagery, relaxation and counselling”) was the intervention chosen. The hypnotherapy studies together covered 6,020 people. They published their results in 1992 in the Journal of Applied Psychology, volume 77, No 4, pages 554-561.

The mean quit rate for hypnotherapy-based interventions was 36%, the highest of any of the methods apart from the “cardiac patients” group at 42% (in other words, very ill people who had a strong motivation to stop an unhealthy behaviour). The effectiveness of hypnotherapy varied from 12% to 60% in the various programs. In contrast, “self-care” – trying to give up by yourself with the help of books, etc. – had an effectiveness varying from 3% to 27% with a mean of 15%, medication’s effectiveness was between 4% and 32% with a mean of 18%, and nicotine chewing gum’s effectiveness varied from 4% to 24% with a mean of 16%.

Subtract from all of these the quit rate of the control group, which was between 2% and 16% with a mean of 6.4%. This is presumably the number of people who gave up smoking “naturally” without any intervention.

Since the average success rate was 25% across all the programs, this means that we can divide the interventions into two groups:

More successful than average, in descending order:

1. Heart disease (42%)
2. Hypnotherapy (36%)
3. Miscellaneous techniques such as biofeedback, meditation, roleplaying and exercise (35%)
4. Lung disease (34%)
5. Smoke aversion (31%)
6. Acupuncture and group withdrawal clinics (about equal, 30%)
7. Other aversive techniques apart from smoke aversion (27%)
8. Five-day plans (an educational technique involving showing films of the effect of smoking on the lungs and displaying an actual lung specimen, which sounds like another aversion technique, 26%)

Less successful than average, in descending order:

1. Educational plans other than five-day plans and group withdrawal clinics (24%)
2. Medication (drugs) and physician intervention more than just advice (about equal, 18%)
3. Nicotine gum (16%)
4. Self-care (15%)
5. Physician advice (7%)
6. No intervention (6%)

There was not a great difference in the quit rates of light versus heavy smokers.

Now, one big implication of this study that I’ll point out is this. Scientific studies like this look at the average or most common outcome for a group that includes individuals with many different specific outcomes. Out of more than 6000 people who received hypnosis to give up smoking, close to 4000 could tell the story, “I tried giving up smoking with hypnosis and it didn’t work.” Of course, there were over 5500 out of 6800 who could tell the story, “I tried to give up smoking with medication and it didn’t work,” and almost 6700 out of 7200 who could say, “My doctor advised me to give up smoking and it didn’t work”. Giving up smoking is evidently very hard, but it can be done, and if you’re going by this study, hypnosis appears to be your best bet.

I believe some of the studies included in this one have been since questioned based on the methodology they used, so the picture may be somewhat different in the 15 years since. Take a look at my other posts tagged “smoking” for more.

Technorati Tags: hypnosis, hypnotherapy, smoking, health, smoking cessation, quit smoking, quitting, hypnosis effectiveness, hypnosis doesn’t work, scientific study

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