“Hypnosis – state of extreme relaxation and inner focus in which a person is unusually responsive to suggestions made by the hypnotist. The modern practice has its roots in the idea of animal magnetism, or mesmerism, originated by Franz Mesmer.[443] Mesmer’s explanations were thoroughly discredited, and to this day there is no agreement amongst researchers whether hypnosis is a real phenomenon, or merely a form of participatory role-enactment.[272][444][445] Some aspects of suggestion have been clinically useful.[446][447] Other claimed uses of hypnosis more clearly fall within the area of pseudoscience. Such areas include the use of hypnotic regression, including past life regression.[448]”
Some aspects of mythology or alchemy are also useful, but that doesn’t mean it’s an overall respected science or isn’t caused by a secondary phenomenon. As that wiki states, it’s the suggestion aspect that is useful, not the hypnosis itself (the methodology) and there isn’t really a consensus on its efficacy.
The statement “If it’s useful for anything, then it’s not pseudoscience” is an example of a logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy or a false dilemma. This fallacy occurs when someone presents a situation as if there are only two mutually exclusive options or possibilities when, in fact, there are more potential alternatives or nuances to consider.
In this case, the statement implies that something can either be “useful” or “pseudoscience,” with no middle ground or other possibilities. In reality, an idea or concept can have some utility or practical applications while still being considered pseudoscientific or lacking scientific validity. The two categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and this oversimplified dichotomy ignores the complexity of the subject matter.
This is basically part of the joke that this headline implies.
Psuedoscience is psuedoscience because it produces no objectively useful results, if Hypnosis demonstrates measurable and repeatably provable results, then it’s not psuedoscience
No, pseudoscience simply consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. It’s more about methodology and subsequent reproducibility, not simply results. There’s an important difference here.
Even pseudoscientific fields can produce results that appear to be beneficial or effective; however, these results may not be replicable, may be the result of placebo effects, or other biases.
As the earlier wiki link states: “Criticism of pseudoscience, generally by the scientific community or skeptical organizations, involves critiques of the logical, methodological, or rhetorical bases of the topic in question.”
That “some aspects” in the earlier, previously quoted context is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Notice the word ‘suggestion’ in place of hypnosis. The following entry is related directly to hypnotherapy in that link. If you look under Efficacy in this next wiki link, nearly all meta studies say there is inconclusive evidence to support this practice as any sort of standalone treatment. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotherapy?wprov=sfla1 Partial evidence may hint that it is touching on something(s) we can isolate and apply in a better way.
Bro if Dowsing Roads could actually find water, it wouldn’t matter if people thought it was magic, there’d be something there to study and figure out why.
This is also a logical fallacy, actually several. False analogy (qualitative vs quantitative) and appeal to authority, namely. There is a practitioner here telling you it’s a placebo (literally a sham medical treatment, that can be useful for secondary effects), wiki classifies it as pseudoscience… Again, even pseudoscientific fields can produce results that appear to be beneficial or effective; however, these results may not be replicable, may be the result of placebo effects, or other biases. No major journal is currently touching this topic as a potential standalone treatment.
I’m not sure what else you want, but I sure hope that you don’t work in the sciences. 😅
This isn’t a good journal and the author isn’t an MD. The journal barely has an impact factor. 10 or more is considered very good (extremely reliable). This journal has less than 2; that’s super abysmal. Again, there is a reason major journals (IF of much more than 10) don’t deal with this.
The Impact Factor for a journal is calculated by dividing the number of citations in a year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. This journal is barely a footnote. For comparison, Nature, one of the best of the best, has an IF of 64.8.
Science is a conversation. This low number means that only one or two articles cited each paper from this entire journal in the last two years, even just in passing. It’s not part of the conversation, and hardly has a seat at the discussion table.
Hypnotism is a fun card to play, because it’s the new meditation in some ways. In that you can basically tell Skeptics from pseudoskeptics depending on how quickly people try to debunk it.
This one has been sighted five times in the past 2 years, with four of them being from this year alone.
There are people who love science, and there are people who know science. You have outed yourself as the former.
Bro my therapist uses hypnosis to calm down erratic patients, it isn’t her main card, but it is a weapon in her Arsenal that has shown to work. She is the director of Behavioral Health at her practice.
She is also an atheist and a self-proclaimed rationalist.
Meditation used to be considered “woo woo” nonsense too but that’s not really how the peer review worked out.
Hypnotism is real, it doesn’t actually let you control and it certainly isn’t Magic or some kind of psychic power like it is in Pokemon, but it has been documented as a effective treatment for irritable bowel syndrome and smoking addiction.
I’m asking you to back yourself with a credible journal. You did not and jumped to anecdote. I’m open to having my mind changed but I want to see actual evidence. This next journal has an impact factor of 2. This is not a great score, especially for medicine. Hell, even Frontiers scores higher. Placebos do work and have utility, by the way, just as the Harvard article I linked said and I’ve repeated over and over. That’s not the issue.
Except it’s not a placebo and it has actually been shown to have an effect on the human mind, there is a difference between thinking you’re getting better and actually getting better. Placebo can only make you think that you’re getting better, there is no actual measurable effect. Which is not the case with hypnosis.
Here’s another Journal, it was in my previous post, but admittedly I got the link wrong at first and had to edited in, so I don’t know that you actually saw it, unless you mean another site entirely in which case why not just say so?
And I have no idea what you mean by an impact factor, I have never heard this term before when discussing these kinds of things.
If you want documentation on hypnosis being used to treat smoking and irritable bowel syndrome, I can provide that too.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor?wprov=sfla1 This is part of how the scientific conversation works, it’s not perfect but good for generalising and mostly reliable. Things that become mainstream parts of the conversation will get more citations, especially as funding will flow those ways, so a lot of the criticisms smooth over. I’m trying to explain how this all works because it’s complicated and valuable to know and very political. Just because someone published something doesn’t make it infallible. There’s really a range of grey because it is a conversation. Having a good journal backing you carries a lot of weight as they rest their reputation on you, multiplying your voice in a way. I like to picture it like a video game multiplier.
PubMed is a search engine for many journals. It’s not one journal.
When you write a paper, you’re not trying to prove something. You’re trying to attack your hypothesis from all angles and disprove it. You want to be wrong because what’s the fun in knowing everything.
I apologize for my outbursts, but I have ran into so many dude Bros over the years… the kind of people who think science is agreeing with their favorite YouTube Skeptic and yelling “FAKE” at anything they don’t understand or contradictis their preferred skeptic…
I run into this kind of person a lot on science forums, so knowing if a forum has those kinds of people let’s me know if actual science is going to be discussed here or if it’s going to devolve into a circle jerk.
It’s easy for me to lose my temper. I should be better than this, and I will thank you for teaching me about two new things. One impact factor and two that PubMed is not by itself a journal, I don’t publish things because I’m not a doctor myself. I merely someone who tries to stay educated. I apologize if I ever gave the impression that I was trained in The Sciences as opposed to someone who merely has an interest in them.
Hypnotism is a card I typically have, and the more negative someone reacts to it, the easier it is for me to test the water.
I apologize for my deception, but as far as I am aware, it isn’t a question whether or not hypnosis exists and actually works, it’s a question of what the practical application sport are. One thing we know for sure is that memory recovery is not one of these applications, as the hypnotic state will cause someone to create a memory not actually remember one. Which is a shame. This is why one needs to be very wary of any past life memories that have resurfaced thanks to meditation, I’d be wary of any past life memories at all to be honest, given how easy self deception is when it comes to just things involving this life.
That’s ok. It’s good to question things. I realise this stuff is hard. I added an important caveat to how we approach hypotheses. There is actually a lot of writing about how there is too much information to filter these days, even for academics. This is why we rely on things like impact factor. Additionally, anyone can technically publish in a journal but it is hard to get into because of these kinds of politics.
I’m glad there are no hard feelings, and I apologize I guess I am a bit naive on the nature of these journals, I figured that just getting one published and recognized was already an incredibly difficult process subject to much scrutiny.
If this is not the case, then that is news to me and wish to be better informed.
I will try to get you those peer reviewed papers on the smoking and irritable bowel syndrome claims, but for the future is there a good way to know the impact score of a paper? There are a lot of papers on meditation and even some claiming to make statements on the subject of life after death that I would love to see further scrutinized, while the former is pretty much accepted by everyone at this point, the latter is very much a question and a question that many neurologists and physicists believe is answered by no.
When you find a paper, Google the name of the journal + “impact factor”, and you should find something. Some journals display their metrics with different scores due to complications with the IF system, so you’ll need to judge those accordingly but they should come up with the same search keywords. There should be a body of literature with higher scores, not just single papers too. Also, look up your authors and see if this is actually something they’re qualified for. This all shows the idea has been established and accepted as part of the mainstream conversation. This is the academic “sniff test.”
The problem with hypnosis isn’t the absence of evidence, it’s the lack of significant effects (efficacy), notably as a standalone treatment. Most sciences measure this with a variant of a p-value. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value?wprov=sfla1 Note that interpretations of p-values are susceptible to placebo effects.
It’s also kind of important that the research is relatively newer because of some metascience trends have changed our understanding of things and we have different standards now.
If there is no absence of evidence, then we can’t disregard it as bullshit now can we? It sounds more like we haven’t found the right applications or we need to develop better methods of using it.
As for it’s not working as a standalone treatment, does anything these days? I’m on medication for bipolar and anxiety but I still need to regularly see my therapist. The medication by itself isn’t going to fix anything.
Efficacy. It needs to pass through this before it gets to effectiveness testing. Meta studies are important for examining this hence the wiki section mention earlier, which lists a bunch.
Note that just being in the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not being cannibalised. Papers or trends may arise that put other researchers in a tizzy. If it’s an accepted practice, you are likely to see a lot of papers fine tuning methods.
The placebo thing shuffles it under their umbrella. There’s a lot of issues there with those.
If I understand what you were saying, is that we have evidence that there is something there, but that’s about all we have, and anyone claiming to have anything more than that when it comes to hypnosis is a charlatan who is best ignored. And that those who practice meditation need to be careful to avoid making big claims with it, and not have high expectations.
Because we have evidence that it works, but nothing more than that, Placebo is the best official classification it can have even if that doesn’t completely perfectly fit, but it is the best label we can give it for now until we know more.
Am I understanding correctly, or if I completely lost the plot? Because I’m only telling you as I understand it. Which I admit considering you have already corrected me on some terms that I did not know, my understanding may be more limited then I realized it was prior to entering this conversation.
You generally got it. ;) The grey areas keep things interesting. Methodology is also important to consider and pick apart more and more considerations of appropriate applications and working contexts. It may be that this practice should be re-categorised rhetorically too, e.g. the language that we use to talk about this subject causes too much confusion as this thread exemplifies.
Lots of things have once been seen as mystical woo, but later had some of the phenomena established with good investigations. From what I have seen, and I’m by no means an expert, that body of literature one would expect for this just isn’t there yet.
Ps: Determining a good IF score will depend on the niche-ness and topic as well but that is why you try not to examine literature in a vacuum of one or two papers. Naturally, those that read more on these specific subjects are the best judges.
Actually that is something I have wanted to ask about but I haven’t really found the right person to ask or the right forum, that being, how many instances do we see in which something that was previously completely written off of pseudoscience turn around and actually become established science.
Off at the top of my head the only thing I can think of is how the existence of germs was originally thought of as complete Insanity, and the paranoia of one addled individual who swore up and down that these invisible creatures where everywhere and were making everybody sick.
There is the matter of the Earth revolving around the sun being the reverse at one point, which is mistaken for a religious claim however at the time of galileo, other scientists came to completely different conclusions with their own telescopes and had refused to endorse his position due to a lack of evidence.
If I remember correctly, Galileo had an obsession with pillars that would have been even stronger evidence than what he thought he saw in the telescope had he just looked a little closely. One of those crazy little ironies I suppose.
And finally, the Big Bang Theory in a weird inversion of expectation was actually established by a priest, who was mocked by scientists who came up with the name Big Bang as a way of writing off his idea as a uniquely Catholic perspective that no way resembled good science. And then the steady state universe theory kind of collapsed and was replaced by the Big Bang Theory that had been so mocked. If I were correctly I believe Albert Einstein had his photograph taken with this priest.
But outside of that, I can’t think of anything, it would be cool to find a list of these somewhere.
What is and isn’t good science changes with changes in metascience (the science of science); which is also why it’s important to keep current with the literature, especially in today’s world. Philosophy and History of Science are fields that are having an exciting little boom right now with tonnes of great researchers and lay books.
(As an aside, I use wiki a lot for a quick jumping off point as I trust it a bit more after I started editing it; they do try their best and are vigilant and passionate.)
I like this guy from Durham in particular: markrubin.substack.com - he’s got some cool links in the about section, but his stuff is a little technical. Nice dude.
Hypnosis is not magic, nor is it some CIA mind control technique; it’s basically just a sugar pill in ritual form, leveraging the mind’s natural ability to fuck with itself. That means that, while it’s ultimately just a very versatile parlor trick, it can be handy for dealing with issues that are, themselves, all in your head. I take great pride in being able to replicate or one-up the results of any faith healer or acupuncturist, without any of the bullshit–because unlike them, I know what’s actually going on, and what I can and can’t do.
Of course, there are some hypnotists who veer into woo-woo–claiming they can help you visit previous lives, uncover repressed memories, even make your dick bigger. I freely admit that I can’t do that–though if you wanted to believe it badly enough, I could probably make you think I did, at least for a little bit.
God, my first comment in the fediverse and it’s about this.
Dr Thomas Phantasy, Dr Benjamin Shamfield and Randy The Amazing are my new favourite trio of crime solving detectives. With hypnosis they uncover theft, kidnappings, and even murder? Follow them in the next issue of “Wait, wtf did I just read”.
Add comment