Hypnotherapy – can it help people with cancer?

Hypnotherapy can help people with cancer, though perhaps not in the way some people claim

Few words can strike as much fear into a person as does ‘cancer’. A third to a half of us will have a taste of it at some point in our lives, 360,000 are diagnosed every year (www.macmillan.org.uk) and some will inevitably fail to recover.

It’s understandable that those who receive a positive diagnosis will go through intense turmoil as they struggle to make sense of their sudden entry into a world of medical terminology, prognoses and the effects of the diagnosis upon family and friends.

Many will begin to do their own research and many will stumble upon websites and literature which appear to promise a solution.

I see a good number of cancer patients and use hypnotherapy in Reading, Oxford, London, Wallingford and Thame to help them.

But…

At this point I’d like to be very clear. There is NO valid research which proves that cancer can be cured by hypnotherapy
hypnotherapy and cancer

I truly wish it could be claimed that hypnotherapy can help to cure cancer. It is, however, illegal under the 1939 Cancer Act to make such a claim and since that time there has been no research which proves this to be true.

There is a very good reason why fewer people die of nasty infectious diseases than at any time in our species’ history. There’s a good reason why survival rates for cancer sufferers continue to improve over time.

The reason is that modern, secular and science-based medicine is the most effective it has ever been. Gone are the four humours, fears of miasma, theories of spontaneous generation et al.

Gone are the days of bleeding, leeches, trephining, swallowing prayers written on paper and ingesting mice in various forms (an ancient Egyptian favourite). Western medicine can’t save everybody from everything but it is the best hope we have. 

Please, please, please ignore those who for monetary, ideological or anecdotal reasons will try to convince you otherwise, whether explicitly or by subtler implication. Yes, their mum/uncle/cat may have undergone any number of bizarre treatments but their recovery (if it happened or proved permanent) is more likely to be correlation than due to this alleged cause. The great danger of the internet is that it gives nutjobs a megaphone through which to spread their idiocy. Desperate people can find it easy to find comfort in their certainty. Listening to those who promise you a solution if you adjust your diet in a certain way or adopt some other esoteric approach risk delaying your best bet of recovery. 

However, if you have been diagnosed with cancer then it is possible that hypnotherapy could help you.

Radiotherapy can be somewhat uncomfortable, particularly if it is repeatedly applied over a period of time.

I have worked with clients so as to help them minimise and live with their experience of such discomfort. Here is a real way in which hypnotherapy can help people with cancer and the research supports this claim.

Some cancers can require bone-marrow biopsies and these can be painful. Hypnotherapy could help such patients to manage this pain too. 

People with cancer will become well acquainted with needles, invasive procedures of all kinds and many will be uncomfortable. There’s no way of sugar-coating this bitter pill. There are, however, ways of managing the experience of such procedures so as to leave them as easy to endure as possible.

Hypnosis in the pursuit of pain management is of increasing interest to medical doctors and I’m glad to say that the clients I have seen for pain management have seen beneficial results. If you have cancer and are undergoing painful procedures then I’d be glad to discuss with you how hypnotherapy could be of benefit.