The Guardian
22-04-2013
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From the archive, 22 April 1955: The medical value of hypnotism

The British Medical Association reports on the medical use of hypnotism

The seal of respectability is conferred on the ancient art of hypnotism in a report on the medical use of hypnotism, issued by the British Medical Association to-day. After collecting evidence from doctors and dentists for nearly two years a committee of three psychiatrists and a family doctor recommend that all medical students should be instructed in the possibilities, limitations, and dangers in hypnotism as a form of therapy.

They also feel that tuition in the clinical uses of hypnosis should be given to all medical postgraduates training as specialists in psychological medicine, as well as, possibly, to trainee anaesthetists and obstetricians. Research into the phenomena involved in hypnotism they recommend should be organised by university departments and the research foundations.

These recommendations arise out of the conclusion that hypnotism has a definite, if small, place in orthodox medicine. A somewhat similar conclusion was reached by another committee of the B.M.A. some sixty years ago.

The committee agree that the practice is sometimes the treatment of choice in certain psychosomatic disorders. Itching conditions of the skin are a case in point. But in such cases hypnotism is best regarded as a useful adjunct to other forms of psychiatric treatment. As one of the committee observed at a press conference yesterday, “It is a champion abbreviator of treatment” enabling the psychiatrist quickly to uncover hidden motives and to “put his own ideas across.”

When one recalls that major surgical operations were being performed successfully a hundred years ago with hypnosis taking the place of an anaesthetic, it is not surprising to find the committee acknowledging that the method has some use in surgery and dentistry where there is reason to avoid anaesthetics. A member of the committee said that as women in the advanced stages of labour are especially suggestible, it is usually possible by hypnosis to rid a woman of all memory of her accouchement. The process, however, is prolonged and boring for the doctor as well as depriving the woman of a sense of achievement at bearing her child.

Learning how to hypnotise is apparently quite simple, but a decision about who is a suitable subject is another matter. This decision, it is felt, should be left to the psychiatrist because of the dangers involved. Practitioners of hypnosis claim that the hypnotist cannot make the subject do anything that he would not ordinarily do. But, say the committee, where the patient is predisposed, either constitutionally or through disease, to severe psychoneurotic reactions or anti-social behaviour there is a danger that hypnosis may bring out these qualities. For that reason the commission of crimes, involving even danger to life, is not entirely to be ruled out.

The committee point out that hypnotism may involve the rapid or immediate development of a relationship between the hypnotist and subject of the same order and intensity as the relationship produced more slowly in the course of psychotherapy. The trained psychotherapist, however, must be aware of this relationship as part of the therapeutic process and recognise its potentiality for harm as well as being able to deal with it. But the application of the hypnotic technique without such knowledge and experience provides no control of the powerful emotions which may be released.

For this reason the committee believe that harm can be done by the application of hypnotism, especially when used by persons indifferent of the well being of the subject or ignorant of the morbid complications of the hypnotic state. They recommend, therefore, that the use of hypnotism in the treatment of physical and psychological disorders should be confined to persons subscribing to the recognised ethical code governing the doctor-patient relationship.

Rather surprisingly, however, they concede that this would not preclude the use of hypnotism by a suitably trained psychologist or medical auxiliary, of whose competence the medical practitioner was personally satisfied, and who would carry out, under medical direction, the treatment of patients selected by the physician.