Hypnotherapy on BBC TV

On BBC 2 last night (Monday 17th) there was a program called Alternative Therapies that looked at Hypnotherapy in the first program. The presenter is Kathy Sykes; she is listed as a Professor of Science at Bristol University. (Her role appears to be to communicate science to the masses.)

Kathy starts the program apparently skeptical about what hypnosis and hypnotherapy can achieve (unfortunately there appeared to be very little differentiation between the hypnotic process and the therapy process).

She started with a stage hypnotist show and then moved on into various research areas. Personally I found the program frustrating at times as hypnotherapy was dismissed for not having any clinical trials to back it up and then damned again by unspecified research that showed hypnosis/hypnotherapy was no better than counseling.

What the presenter appeared to miss in her search for the elusive hypnotic state is that it happens so often, that people are looking for the obvious and then missing it or calling it something else.

The program drew to a conclusion as it looked at research done with brain imaging equipment that should (surprise!) that subjects in a hypnotic state use a different part of the brain to this who are merely responding to simple suggestion.

The final scenes had a tooth extraction and replacement done with hypnotic pain control. Even then the presenter appeared to think that simple suggestion could have achieved the same thing (although she was cringing whilst watching the procedure).

The program concluded with Kathy returning to see the stage hypnotist (Gary McCoy I believe) to see if she could now engage with the hypnotic process more fully having finally been convinced by brain scan research being conducted in Montreal.

From a hypnotherapist's or hypnotist's point of view, it is a difficult program that may well have you shouting at the TV screen in disagreement with what is happening (the IBS Doctor who described his hypnotic method as "droning on a bit" for example!). However it did clearly the show the power of hypnotic pain control and will no doubt promote some debate. Click the link at the top of this post to go top the BBC iPlayer to view the program on-line.