It doesnt have to be placebo effect. Sometimes people get better. If you gave a million people some nonsense medicine, some would get better, just due to random chance. Placebo effect is a term for an effect ON TOP OF this sort of baseline improvement. So, if your mom gave you various homeopathic remedies for all sorts of **** when you were a kid, it would be bizarre if NONE of them ever worked. That would almost be evidence for the TOXIC properties of these cures.

Homeopathy is the absolute worst kind of alternative medicine, and ruins it for the rest of them, in my opinion. Not only is there zero evidence to support any of it, but the practitioners and supporters of it go out of their way to sort of define it as untestable and unfalsifiable. Its essentially a religion. Its bull****. It makes me a little angry to be honest, if only because of how it reflects on the rest of the medical community. I mean, if someone wants to go home and sacrifice a goat or something in order to cure their cancer, then go wild, I could care less. But this stuff is sold in pill form or as some sort of medicine, and correctly or not patients associate this with ACTUAL REAL MEDICINE.

Like I've said, I'm an extremely skeptical person as a general rule, but I am no longer hostile to the idea of alternative medicine. The single most important driving factor in my "conversion" was when I started researching and learning about conventional medicine, and came to discover how much voodoo and hocus pocus is considered conventional and standard of care. A LARGE number of surgical procedures, treatments and therapies that are considered dogma have ZERO evidence supporting them! None, not one study, no evidence at all besides "Well we've always done it that way." Now, mostly this is because they were developed before evidenced-based medicine was a reality, and if they WERE tested, they would be shown to be beneficial and effective. But not ALL of them. Its almost certain that MANY things that we do in hospitals every single day have absolutely zero benefit for the patient, and many more have alternative treatments that arent used because of tradition that are significantly better and safer.

I simply want to hold alternative treatments to the exact same demanding standards we SHOULD be holding conventional treatments to. And so far, stuff like homeopathy has embarrassingly failed at every opportunity.

This thread disproves your statement.

I've never noticed myself being hypnotised even once during any day when I was awake and conscious. Not once have I ever been going about my business and somebody has come up to me and made me do stuff just by telling me to do it, and I've never heard any scientific support for such a claim. We do perform a lot of actions unconsciously, for example regular physical movements like walking around and picking stuff up, but that is completely different to being suggestible or in a trance-like state. Our brain does a lot of work for us but that doesn't mean that our consciousness is floating around doing nothing, just waiting for some puppet-master to jump out and control it.

There's just no physical or biological mechanism for hypnotism to work. The only mechanism there is for it to work is game-theoretical as I suggested earlier (even in 1-on-1 hypnotisms). My telling a person to go to sleep is damn-near identical to anybody else telling a person to go to sleep. The only differences are in the volume or frequency of our voices. Yet hypnotists aren't cursed/blessed to go their entire lives with a permanently hypnotic voice that hypnotises everybody. If that sort of thing were real then hypnotism would be used for a lot more than treating desperate and gullible mental patients and staging shows for entertainment purposes. Successful hypnotists would have the world enslaved already.

Again, I almost completely agree with you, and the part where they think it's unfalsifiable is laughable. In a way these things are a lot like faith, and I always tell my mom she is similar to a religious fanatic for these reasons (to which replies, "you are the dogmatic one because you try to be rational and rely on science, when the rationalists and scientists have gotten so much wrong. Lol so tilting, also since she doesn't believe you can win an argument with logic.)

But there is one thing she says which I think has to be left open as a possibility - that the paradigm in which the testing is done is wrong. When I think about it, it should be thank you get 2 groups with a certain sickness, you give one the medicine and not the other, and you see if they get better. My mom would say that this is the wrong test since different people have different remedies they need, even if the current sickness is the same.

I do think that even with this complication that a more in-depth testing could be done. There's also the theory that the pharmaceutical companies and certain doctors have a financial incentive to keep these alternative medicines from being tested, and from keeping them on the fringe. Still it's probably all BS, or maybe just mostly BS. I know that one time I took a large dosage it had an immediate effect on me that was unlike smaller dosages of the same thing, so I do think that at least that one kind was at least more than a sugar pill.

this needs way moar love

An extreme form of delusion. Yes, people can get heavily deluded even if they don't want to, let alone if they do. There's little that is impressive or good about it.

Pretty sure you can't do it on me without significant violence though.

"I've never noticed myself being hypnotised even once during any day when I was awake and conscious. Not once have I ever been going about my business and somebody has come up to me and made me do stuff just by telling me to do it, and I've never heard any scientific support for such a claim." This is because you have absolutely no idea of what hypnosis is. I'm not being pejorative here, I'm just stating a fact. Hypnosis is a state of mind which is verifiable by brain waves. Let me ask you a question, have you ever been so absorbed in a book, movie, video game that when someone was calling your name you never heard him? Ever drive for a long period of time and realize that you had long ago passed up your turn, or completely zoned out and time flew? That, sir, is hypnosis.

"Our brain does a lot of work for us but that doesn't mean that our consciousness is floating around doing nothing, just waiting for some puppet-master to jump out and control it." Are you gonna actually read what others here have written, or just keep spewing out the mouth? You did get it when I said that there are shows that are pure entertainment, they are not what hypnosis is really about. A hypnotist does not control anyone, nor does he make anyone do anything. Damn it's exhausting repeating the same thing over and over.

"My telling a person to go to sleep is damn-near identical to anybody else telling a person to go to sleep." I can't remember the last time I've used the word "sleep" in a hypnotic induction. I use much more elegant ways to acheive it.

"The only differences are in the volume or frequency of our voices. Yet hypnotists aren't cursed/blessed to go their entire lives with a permanently hypnotic voice that hypnotises everybody." Read my link to anchoring. That is part of what a hypnotist uses the hypnotic voice. There are a few other reasons for it, but it is a tool one uses to be more effective, sort of like an opera singer doesn't go around singing everything she says.

"Successful hypnotists would have the world enslaved already." I don't know if it's funny or sad, but you're the only one here making asinine statements like this. One of this days you're going to learn a skill, "critical reading." You'll look back on this day, and you will definitely be embarrassed. Just don't be too hard on yourself, ok?

No, it ISNT different from being in a suggestible and trance-like state. And in fact, if you were to hook up an EEG to your dome while you were doing some of these things, you would find that your brain goes into stereotypical "hypnotized" patterns. Hypnotism isnt about making you quack like a duck, its about amnesia, analgesia and anesthesia, at least the kind I'm talking about.
What? First off, I assume you mean to say there is no KNOWN mechanism. But even that is false. There is a strong emotional and psychological component to imprinting memories and perceiving stimuli. What you see and experience and remember about the world is NOT what actually happens in the world...rather, it is the version of events that your brain CHOOSES to record and interpret. Hypnotism alters this perception.

There is no physical or biological mechanism for the gases we use in anesthesia to work either. We have no idea how they work, it doesnt make any sense. But they do. There are random-controlled trials that show statistically significant improvement in outcomes with patients undergoing surgical hypnosis. These patients report less pain, use less drugs, have shorter surgeries and shorter recovery times.
Argument from ignorance isnt really that persuasive outside your own head, just for future reference. Neither are Dracula-esque strawmen.

Well, I suppose I cant quibble with this too much. Although I dont see what is so extreme about it. And you make it sound like a bad thing. If a hypnotherapist can sit in an operating room and "delude" a patient into undergoing a major surgical procedure without the benefit of ANY pain medication or anesthesia, then that would be an example of hypnosis "working." Is the patient deluded into feeling no pain? Ok, fine, who cares? You are "deluded" into FEELING pain. Pain is very subjective, and by that I mean even your own mood and emotional state have GIGANTIC influence on how you happen to perceive any given painful stimulus. Pain isnt some static fact of the universe. Nor is, I would imagine, desire or compulsion. You can alter the way that patients PERCEIVE pain and desire and compulsion.

I think the problem is that people think of hypnosis like its some magical thing.

Yep, this is how it usually goes. But it sort of betrays a lack of imagination or a lack of understanding of the scientific method. This isnt really the stumbling block the homeopathy crowd wishes that it were. In the end, it doesnt really matter whether it WORKS or not. It matters whether anyone knows that it works, or can TELL that it works. So, when designing an experiment or thinking of a way to test something, you ask yourself this question: In what way would I expect the world to be different if this were true compared to if this were false? So based on your mothers objections, and hey maybe they are even legitimate objections, we cant do the type of experiments that we like to do, where we control the medication that is given. But thats no big deal. Instead we just control the practitioner. Saying that every patient has their own unique medication that is right for them is only a meaningful thing to say if there is someone who can DETERMINE what that right medication for them is.


So all you would need to do is get a bunch of homeopathers (?) and a bunch of guys like me wearing homeopathy name-tags, and have us go to work. Have us examine 1000 patients each with headaches or something, and see how we do. If they consistently outperform me, then thats pretty good evidence that what they are doing has some benefit. It doesnt tell us what that benefit is or how exactly it works, and its going to be pretty difficult to find that out, but who cares? If it works, it works. Like I said in an earlier post, there are some drugs we use currently that we have NO IDEA how they work...we just know they do. We used aspirin for hundreds of years before we knew how it worked. I dont demand that the homeopathers give detailed mechanisms of how their treatments work (although that would be nice) I simply demand that they show a clear benefit. This is TRICKY to do but absolutely not impossible, and one would think that someone who actually BELIEVES in this nonsense would jump at the chance to prove that it works. Thats what happens in every OTHER part of medicine, people come up with new tricks and then spend gobs of money trying to show that they actually work.

I don't think I've ever been in a position where I was awake and somebody could call my name audibly and I wouldn't instantly realise it. When people miss their junctions it is because they are concentrating on something else. In none of these circumstances do people respond to commands any differently to how they would in any other conscious state. There is no meaningful definition of hypnotism that corresponds to the sort of states that you described above. I suppose the closest thing you could get would be to go without sleep for several days. The trance-like state you would experience there would simply be caused by attempting to sleep at every available opportunity, and you might react slugglishly to stimuli. But you share nothing relevant in common with a supposedly hypnotised person.

Earlier in this thread you said that some Russians hypnotise other Russians on a regular basis and get them to hand over their belongings. How is that not making them do anything? If it's not making them hand over their possessions, then it's making them have the desire to hand over their possessions. You can't just "suggest" to somebody who doesn't want to do x, to do x, and for them to do x as a result.

Are you denying that hypnotism is possible that way? Or just that you don't do it that way?

You provided a link about NLP. There's no good evidence that it is correct and it is widely regarded not to be. If you think you hypnotise people with this method then you are probably not hypnotising people at all.

I'm not saying that you're a fraud, because we both know that something is going on. There aren't enough shills in the world to explain the apparent success of hypnotism-based shows, or hypnotherapy. All I'm saying is that these successes are achieved by phenomena which are not hypnotism, but something else which is interesting and worthy of study. I'm not sure if the methods you use could be improved by understanding their true non-hypnotic nature, because the reason they work is based upon the ignorance and gullibility of the subject and preferably the ignorance of the practitioner as well. You would get the same results if you believed that you could do magical spells or summon guardian angels to change the behaviour of the subjects.

Nobody else is talking about your definition of hypnotism. This thread is about using hypnosis to make people behave in ways they wouldn't have done otherwise: altering their intentional states against their will and belief that it is possible. That is the way most people use the term.

Well in the strictest sense I'm committed to saying that we can't know anything. But what I am saying in the context of this discussion is that a mechanism for hypnotism isn't even consistent with our best scientific theories. I can't even imagine what that mechanism would look like. It could be some sort of telekinesis where you somehow interrupt the commands a subject's brain is sending to their muscles and replace them with new ones. Or it could consist in the existence of unconscious alternative personalities that only get to act when a person is hypnotised, and somehow these personalities are sympathetic to the commands of the hypnotist who knows a way to bring them out. (Maybe by pushing an invisible button on the backs of their necks?) Neither of these are consistent with our best scientific theories

The hypnotists are the ones telling you that you can't make people go against their will.

At the same time, you have to realize that most people don't have very strong will power when it comes to the subconscious.

"I don't think I've ever been in a position where I was awake and somebody could call my name audibly and I wouldn't instantly realise it." You and I both know you are lying here. You just don't want to conced that I'm right about this and you are afraid to admit it.

"When people miss their junctions it is because they are concentrating on something else. In none of these circumstances do people respond to commands any differently to how they would in any other conscious state. There is no meaningful definition of hypnotism that corresponds to the sort of states that you described above." There has been enough published about trance states I don't really need to elaborate. Open your mind, read a book, and you'll realize what an idiotic statement this is.

"If it's not making them hand over their possessions, then it's making them have the desire to hand over their possessions." It's a trick similar to the fast-talking salesman. Get it? I'll tell you what, walk up to someone who is obviously concentrating very hard on something, and ask them to do something, or tell you something you wouldn't expect them to and see what happens. Like, go to a university library and find someone who is buried in a textbook studying hard, walk up to him and ask him, "what's your social security number?" He'll tell you. Ask for his watch, he'll probably be in the middle of handing it to you by the time he realizes something odd is occuring. But I really don't think you're the type of person who actually tries something out to find out if something is true or not or works or not, you just have baseless opinion that you are unwilling to question.

"Are you denying that hypnotism is possible that way? Or just that you don't do it that way?" I'm saying there are more elegant ways.

"If I'm not mistaken you provided a link about NLP. There's no good evidence that it is correct and is widely regarded not to be. If you think you hypnotise people with this method then you are probably not hypnotising people at all." You do know that NLP is not hypnosis, but a model, right? I mean, you are an expert, you do know the difference, right? Then you know that NLP is a model based on several different approaches, one of which is Ericksonian hypnosis, from which the idea of anchoring came about. Fine, you don't believe in anchoring, surely you believe in the classical conditioning of Ivan Pavlov? It's the same thing, dude. Or perhaps the knee-jerk reflex of Dr. Twitmyer (he discovered that patients' legs would kick out when he merely cocked the hammer back as a learned response to having had the test performed in the past).

"I'm not saying that you're a fraud, because we both know that something is going on. There aren't enough shills in the world to explain the apparent success of hypnotism-based shows, or hypnotherapy. All I'm saying is that these successes are achieved by phenomena which are not hypnotism, but something else which is interesting and worthy of study. I'm not sure if the methods you use could be improved by understanding their true non-hypnotic nature, because the reason they work is based upon the ignorance and gullibility of the subject and preferably the ignorance of the practitioner as well. You would get the same results if you believed that you could do magical spells or summon guardian angels to change the behaviour of the subjects." You sir, are a closed-minded pompous prick. Here's a concept for you: do some research! It's funny, those who have have concluded that hypnosis is real, not a ****ing shamanistic magical act. You're just too ****ing stubborn to accept that you are way wrong. Read a book, educate yourself, then attempt to discredit me mother ****er. Believe me, if I could perform magical spells, I'd cast a spell that enabled you to think critically.

orly

Right back at you. If you're just going to call me a liar then there's no point you even elaborating on my other points, is there really? You paint a picture of a world where people spend half their time hypnotised and walking around in trance-states, because your beliefs don't conform to reality. You're just taking the standard line of the pseudo-scientist here and making an unfalsifiable claim.

Yes but this has nothing to do with hypnosis. This is exactly what I was talking about in my first post in this thread. It's more rational to do very slightly -EV actions than to question them. That's why you get these people to give up their seats or tell you the time. You don't get them to give you their watch or wallet. Do two experiments. In the first I go up to these random subjects and ask them to hand over their ID. In the second I do the same but wear a police uniform and tell them I am a member of the police. I will obviously get a lot more IDs in the second experiment than in the first. If you were conducting these experiments you would conclude that people who wear police uniforms have greater abilities to hypnotise than those who don't! These random subjects aren't in trances. They actually think before they act, exactly like every human who ever acts. Although anybody who conversed with you might seriously doubt that.

My point is, if someone is capable of "not feeling pain because of hypnosis", he's pretty much capable of just going, "hey, I'm gonna just ignore this pain OK". I think it's kinda silly that people need such lame mumbo jumbo to be able to utilise the full extent of their capabilities. Or maybe it's that they turn this certain way to utilise their potential into such mumbo jumbo. Whatever it is, it's silly.

Yeah, essentially that's what I'm saying. Also, they think that hypnosis is some sort of external force, while in reality it's just what they have in them. I think it's just lame. And hypnosis as a term the way I've always thought of it has exactly this meaning - the magical mumbo jumbo and delusion type of meaning. If you want to get rid of that flavour, I would much rather phrase everything to do with it using a neutral term such as "manipulation of one's state of mind" or "trance" (be it spontaneous, self-imposed or "assisted"). That's just an aspect of psychology. "Hypnosis" as a concept, in by far the most widespread meaning of the term, is this aspect turned into a joke.

Also, in the end, it has its very clear limits and fans obviously tend to FAR exaggerate the potential of the thing. I am annoyed by that as well.

"You paint a picture of a world where people spend half their time hypnotised and walking around in trance-states, because your beliefs don't conform to reality." You really should try to observe people from time to time. You will notice that they are in trance states a lot more often than you think. Dennis Wier wrote a very good book on trances. Look it up.

"You're just taking the standard line of the pseudo-scientist here and making an unfalsifiable claim." Is that a Freudian slip? I agree, though, my claim is unable to be falsified.

"Yes but this has nothing to do with hypnosis. This is exactly what I was talking about in my first post in this thread. It's more rational to do very slightly -EV actions than to question them. That's why you get these people to give up their seats or tell you the time. You don't get them to give you their watch or wallet. Do two experiments. In the first I go up to these random subjects and ask them to hand over their ID." This is very difficult to discuss with you because you know absolutely nothing about which you speak. Yes, this does have to do with hypnosis, you just don't understand the principles of hypnosis involved. I'll even break them down for you. Seperating the conscious and unconscious mind is what is known as "the critical factor." You bypass this when communicating directly with the unconscious mind. It's not that you just randomly ask people to hand things over to you. You missed what I said about finding people who are concentrating deeply on something. Another word for that is that they are in a trance. You police officer example is not even a fair comparison. That's simple deception, preying on someone's confidence. The other utilizes the confusion principle of hypnotic inductions. Something you have no idea about, therefore you are unable to comprehend. Like I said before, read a ****ing book. This would make so much more sense to you then.

Why don't you try reading a book written by somebody who's actually qualified to write it?

Here's a general rule of thumb for you. People who sell their courses over the internet are almost always selling bull****. People who hold positions in research universities usually aren't.

That you came out with this reply makes it glaringly obvious that you know nothing about scientific method whatsoever, and you won't even realise why. How ironic that you refer to Freud as well. That your theory isn't falsifiable is a sufficient condition for it not to be a scientific theory. It simply admits that there are reasonable competing hypotheses that also fit the evidence, e.g. the game theory one I postulated. However, if you knew what "falsifiable" meant then I think you probably would have answered differently.

I know the basics of scientific method at least. The problem with psychotherapy is that its competing hypotheses are so far unfalsified. They can't all be true because they all require different models of the brain to be correct. Yet they are all partially successful. The reason for this is because they are able to cure psychosomatic illnesses only in those people who do not believe their psychosomatic illnesses to be psychosomatic. They work purely in virtue of the subject's ignorance. I suspect that the reason why Dianetics is so successful is because those who undergo it are particularly ignorant compared to those who volunteer for more middle-of-the-road treatments like hypnotherapy. Those who practise Dianetics make sure to get the most gullible and ignorant people on board because only those people can accept the ludicrousness of Scientology. Other people can be cured of the same illnesses as a result of witchcraft, exorcisms, aromatherapy, homeopathy, self-help, the Holy Spirit etcetera. None of these are supported by our best scientific theories, and neither are hypnotherapy and psychotherapy, but they act as powerful placeboes to ignorant people.

When somebody is concentrating deeply on something and is interrupted, they stop concentrating deeply on the thing, and start concentrating on the interruption. There is no window of opportunity whereby you can catch them off guard. Sometimes they ignore the interruption and go back to the thing they were concentrating on, e.g. when I'm driving I tend to ignore people who talk to me about something difficult to understand. There are no trance states. I know you think I'm making a strawman argument and accusing you of claiming that people walk around like zombies with their eyes closed and their arms out-stretched when they are concentrating, because really you would say that trances are all or mostly invisible. You might even say that we are always in some form of trance, just not always a deep trance. But that theory is pure rubbish. If you'd ever met anybody who regularly concentrated deeply on the hardest subjects, you would find that you could interrupt them by asking them whether they want a coffee or sandwich, they can temporarily suspend their previous thoughts and rationally answer your question before going back to where they were in their thought-process. There just is no nonsense at all about the correlation between a person's degree of concentration and their suggestibility.

While I strongly doubt a stranger could come up and ask me for my watch while I was studying (or even my SSN), I think it's kind of foolish for some of you to be lumping in hypnosis with the paranormal and calling it a big scam. I've seen it work on people up close so I have no doubt it can achieve some result on some people.

It's important to be skeptical of too much skepticism!

"Why don't you try reading a book written by somebody who's actually qualified to write it?

Here's a general rule of thumb for you. People who sell their courses over the internet are almost always selling bull****. People who hold positions in research universities usually aren't."

Fine then, I guess that means you would definitely agree with a man who was the founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychopathological Association who was both a medical doctor in psychiatry and a Ph.D. in Psychology? (Milton Erickson)

Richard Bandler has an M.A. in psychology, Jay Haley, one of the founders of family therapy, Dr. Stephen Gilligan, Ph.D., Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ernest Rossi, the list goes on and on, my man. Reputable people. Highly educated SCIENTISTS, ****er.

"When somebody is concentrating deeply on something and is interrupted, they stop concentrating deeply on the thing, and start concentrating on the interruption. There is no window of opportunity whereby you can catch them off guard." And you've experimented with this, right. You have a reasonable sample size of trials you have tried this out and can say this from a scientific point of view, because I have, idiot, and can tell you it is quite effective (not to mention the previous-mentioned scams in Russia). Sorry you're just not, how do I put it, scientific enough.
I really am done with you now. You have not actually taken the time to do any research, you just spew nonsense.

RussianBear, may I suggest you undergo some hypnotherapy for anger management.

Not angry, nothing but love over here. It's just very exhausting debating with someone who hasn't taken the time to research the opposition.

No. Why would I agree with these people? I'd put them in the same boat as L. Ron Hubbard and Baron Samedi. Note how these people are forced to leave academia when they start publishing this stuff. They are no longer part of the scientific community, if they ever were. I'm not sure whether all of these people are scammers, because some of them put enough effort into their work and go to lengths to make their theories coherent. However, coherence is not enough. No study that I have ever seen has ever concluded that any branch of psychotherapy has a significant edge on curing supposed mental disorders that a placebo would not have.

I haven't done it. Why would I when I've read the actual research? Have you got any sources that anybody in Russia was ever hypnotised into giving away their wallets? All I can find is this:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...ypnotic01.html

Any reasonable person would infer that hypnosis had nothing to do with those cases. People tend to make up stories when they realise that they acted irrationally or stupidly. Fairly often I see people on the street who claim to have lost all their possessions and need about £10 to get a taxi to get home. Presumably every now and again people actually give them the money, and then watch as the same person spends the next week in the same spot asking other people for money. They might reason that they would never be so stupid to fall for the scam. But they did. Therefore, they reason, there must have been another reason why they did. So they imagine and come to believe that there were other reasons. If they're already inclined to believe that hypnosis is a real phenomenon (which seems to be the most likely belief in unenlightened parts of Russia), then they will use that as an excuse and even report the hypnosis to the police. They'll even tell themselves that they were in a trance or that they forgot what happened, because this is what they believe is involved with hypnotism.

People act differently to how they think they will act quite often. Kahnemann and Tversky showed that not only do most people make bad decisions when they play games where they can win or lose money, but that these same people can be made to realise their mistakes, and yet still commit them again. They're capable of working out their expected utility, say that they will act upon their expected utility, but still fail to do so. (And no hypnotist will ever be awarded a Nobel Prize)

People are rubbish at predicting how they will feel about something later. Ask a person how unhappy they would be in a month if they went blind today, and they often report that their life would be miserable, some going as far as saying that their life would be worthless. Ask people who have been blind for a month how happy they are and they will claim to be much happier than the non-blind people predicted they would be, with many claiming to be happier since they have been blind. I can give you the sources for several studies that find these results. The behaviour of subjects in the last two paragraphs seems quite enough to me to explain why some people would hand over their possessions to strangers and then later claim to have been hypnotised.

I think that although you know a lot of the clinical hypnosis literature well, your perspective is quite badly skewed by it. What happens when you come into contact with a psychotherapist from another discipline? What happens when you both realise that your therapies have equal success rates, despite teaching completely different theories of psychology and therefore biology? Each of your schools of thought are coherent and consistent from the inside, but they go too far to explain the evidence. The evidence is already explained by existing scientifically-tested theories.

"Note how these people are forced to leave academia when they start publishing this stuff." Erickson was never forced to leave academia. In fact, he taught at various medical schools and was very well respected. Look him up before you run your mouth. Really, that's not a bad idea, you should have an idea of what you are talking about before you respond. By your logic all doctors who work in private practices are not too be trusted because they are no longer in academia. I'll keep that in mind.

"No study that I have ever seen has ever concluded that any branch of psychotherapy has a significant edge on curing supposed mental disorders that a placebo would not have." That's exactly the problem, you refuse to acknowledge those studies that don't support your view. Wait, you refuse to even read them.

"Any reasonable person would infer that hypnosis had nothing to do with those cases." Any reasonable person with no knowledge of hypnosis, such as yourself.

I love how you attempt to apply game-theory to hypnosis. Perhaps you should look into studies on hypnosis itself. I mean, that would make sense, wouldn't. My god you exhaust me with your dribble.