by Jeshi » June 2nd, 2012, 9:45 pm
Hypnosis isn't placebo, that's not what placebo means. A placebo calms someone down because they believe something has been done. When you're in need of treatment, you probably find you have a tendency to exaggerate symptoms to yourself and others to speed up the process. If asked to rate pain on a scale of 1 to 10, most people who need treatment will say something over 6 even if it's more accurately a 4. A 8 will get more attention than a 4, will a 4 even get you treatment at all?
So when you get the placebo, you calm down, and don't need to exaggerate the symptoms anymore because you got treatment, you don't have to worry anymore. So now you can more easily admit that it's really just a 4, to yourself and to others, so it seems like the pain has gone down.
It can apply to lots of things. With sleeping pills, the idea that you've taken a sleeping pill calms you and you don't worry about falling asleep, which helps you fall asleep, so placebos make great sleeping pills (so long as you don't know you're taking a placebo.)
Then this weird thing happened where the placebo went mainstream, and people didn't understand the placebo effect, so even when told that it was a placebo people thought "yeah but placebos always work a little anyway" so they still ended up acting like they'd been treated.
Hypnosis is psychological, but that's where the connections to a placebo end. Hypnosis is used to convince people of things. A placebo convinces someone that they've been treated, but hypnosis tries to convince people as the point. You don't treat actual problems with hypnosis, like sickness or pain, it's not smart. You treat habits. Smoking, exercise, etc. You convince them through hypnosis of certain ideas to help them break the habit, and on a regular basis it can work. For some people, the idea of being hypnotized makes them more motivated.
I think hypnotherapy is pretty dubious though. A lot of hypnotherapists make outlandish impossible claims about hypnosis in order to make more money. Those people are selling snake oil and giving hypnosis a bad reputation. The psychology trick that is hypnosis can definitely help with habits, but it won't cure your cancer.
I think people who claim that hypnosis only works in person, but that anything else is "placebo" are just trying to make more money. They're probably all professionals who get more money if it's in person. Feedback can make sessions significantly better, but if someone takes the suggestion through a file then it still worked just the same. It's a psychology trick both ways, just one way it's easier. A used car salesman can more easily convince you to buy a car if they see your feedback, but advertisements in print and media still work too.