Western medicine is at its very best when treating acute problems and emergencies such as heart attacks, broken bones and infectious disease. It is much less effective in treating chronic disease, especially when symptoms are ‘medically unexplained’ or functional. And little assistance is given for very important disease prevention lifestyle measures such as weight loss and smoking cessation.
Hypnotherapy is a holistic treatment that embraces the fact that the mind and body are intricately bound up with each other. Western medicine has traditionally treated them as entirely separate. But a health problem is never fully located in the body or mind. Each impacts on the experience of the other in a constant interplay. Your mind will have a particular experience of your physical body – no two people will experience a physical health problem in the same way. And in turn, your mind has a profound effect on your body. Evidence for this includes the astonishing power of the placebo effect. Hypnotherapy brings this together and treats it as one
Hypnosis also utilises fact that most of what goes on in our mind is unconscious. We may like to believe we are rational, cognitive and logical most of the time, but this conscious part of the mind is just the tip of the iceberg. We are greatly influenced by the much larger unconscious part which is irrational, emotional and illogical. The deep dream-like state of relaxation produced during hypnosis allows potential access to unconscious aspects of mental life which could be exacerbating or even causing the presenting problem.