Clinical Experimental Hypnosis

What The Heck Is Clinical Experimental Hypnosis?

When you first hear the words "clinical experimental hypnosis", your body probably braced itself for something bad to suddenly pop out of the blue. Hypnotherapy, also called clinical hypnosis, is medical treatment by helping you think better thoughts to help promote healing, get rid of anxiety or to get rid of bad habits. Why would there be experiments about people's thoughts? Just what are they doing in the basement of the Institute for Clinical Hypnosis?

It's Not What You Think

Calm down, now. Clinical experimental hypnosis is not about trying to use the power of hypnotherapy in order to create a zombie army by cults, governments or mad hypnotherapists. People can't be made to do anything they don’t want to, including become hypnotized. Even if they are agreeable to becoming hypnotized, if the hypnotist suggests something abhorrent to the subject, the subject still retains enough self-awareness to refuse to do it.

So, What Is It, Then?

Clinical hypnosis is a form of alternative therapy, which gets a lot of flack because there haven't been many scientific studies done of the various therapies. Clinical experimental hypnosis is just a means to try and scientifically look at using hypnotherapy for various ailments and behaviors.

Clinical experimental hypnosis is just like a double-blind drug study for a new medication, only instead of a medication, it's hypnosis that's being looked at. Usually, in clinical experimental hypnosis studies, there are only a fraction of the volunteers under hypnosis. The rest aren’t given any treatment (called a "control group") and the others are given the most popular drug or another kind of alternative therapy, such as acupuncture or acupressure.

Want To Know More?

This isn’t just a group of hobbyists tinkering about – these are medical processes taken very seriously. There is even an organization to help with all of this called the Society of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (SCEH), which has it's headquarters in Pullman, Washington. It was founded in 1949 and is still going strong today. It says that any hypnotherapist needs to embrace scientific experimentation as a way to help people better.

Ailments that respond well to hypnotherapy include quitting smoking, loosing weight, managing skin conditions (especially those that flare up when you are under stress), managing stress, irritable bowel syndrome, nail biting, phobias, allergies, ailments brought on by tension and insomnia. Please do not use this article in the place of your doctor or therapist's advice.