News and Information

Interesting article from the NCH website : People often ask “Why isn’t there more research on hypnosis?”  In fact, the people who ask this, in my experience, never seem to have read (or even heard of) the main research journals in the field of hypnosis (IJCEH, AJCH, and Contemporary Hypnosis) and are unaware that there’s actually an awful lot of research on hypnosis, arguably more than on any other psychological therapy, apart from cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).  However, one of the problems facing hypnosis researchers is that methods of hypnotherapy are too messy, eclectic and complex to be well-suited to good research design.  It helps build an evidence base if a treatment is “manualised” and can be described in a guide so that other researchers can replicate it in independent studies.  Hypnotherapists tend to do lots of strange things with clients, making it difficult to isolate which “bits” are effective and which...

A number of studies have examined the effectiveness of hypnosis in treating pain, either when used alone or alongside cognitive behavioural therapy. Pain is one of the best-researched areas - there have been a number of meta-analyses (literally a study of studies - one of the most a reliable ways to find out if there is an effect) of hypnosis for pain control. Methods of pain control Hypnotic approaches to pain relief take three forms: Direct suggestion for symptom change Dissociative approaches - encourages clients to mentally 'go elsewhere' and leave the pain behind Resource utilisation - a more Ericksonian approach Meta-Analyses Meta-analyses are essentially studies of studies. Where individual studies can sometimes show contradictory results, meta-analyses can be used to assess the performance of a treatment over a number of studies - this takes advantage of a larger sample size and hopefully leads to a more reliable result. Montgomery, David, Winkel,...