Some people are scammers, is this news?

Also, i did point out scientific evidence of physical effects (brain changes) in hypnosis. The effects of hypnosis are REAL, ladies have painless childbirthing thanks to it and countless surgeries where made without anesthetics during war time (when the simply didn't have any left).

From the wikipedia article:

But you seem to react quite defensively to the topic, there isn't much sense in me trying to persuade you.

You cannot cure cancer with hypnosis (i agree with the criminal fraudster part for those who say otherwise) but you can definetely improve the living condition of people with cancer by using hypnosis: http://www.triroc.com/sunnen/topics/cancer.hypnosis.htm
http://www.mindmotivations.com/resources/hypnosis-and-cancer-trials

If you say that "hypnosis" is sometimes used out of place by scammers i DO agree with you.
But the FACT that clinical hypnosis exists and helps a LOT of people is plainly true.

Err, did you read any of my posts?

I used to think I got drunk too, but it was all in my head.

If you define hypnosis as a placebo effect then you are basically admitting that it's nothing because that is what a placebo is. As for your claim that it helps people, "so does" Christianity, Scientology, homeopathy, etc. So do placebos, which by definition are effectively nothing. I don't think measuring brain activity is a very scientific approach to confirming hypnosis without defining what that brain activity means for hypnosis. We already know that brain activity is affected by what the brain is doing and that you can affect changes in brain activity by providing some stimulus.

The idea behind the things you keep calling fraud is that the mind can have a powerful effect on the body. I personally don't care about the hypnotists who offer their services for this stuff because it really does have a low success rate, but the ones experimenting with it for its own sake entirely within the community (and not marketed to the public) have had interesting results.

Again, low success rate, but if you want to look into a specific example of the principle, Google an old case study of Krebiozen and "Mr. Wright" from 1957. You can find write-ups of this from Scientific American to wacko homeopathic sites so everyone can pick their biases. Call it placebo, call it hypnosis, call it bullshit, call it whatever. However, this is the sort of effect your subconscious and beliefs can (and do) have on your physical body, and some hypnotists have been able to produce this phenomenon with hypnosis ... again, LOW success rate. But if the subconscious can have this effect on the body, why would it be considered a leap to say it's at least possible with hypnosis (the only discipline that deals directly with the subconscious)?

Apparently so.

That's because no one cares what bambam says. A placebo can put a cancer patient in full remission and he thinks it's nothing ...

Not that I agree with this, but saying they can't change but change anyway seems contradictory ...

Seconded.

I find that hypnosis is often a form of guided meditation. I started with hypnosis before I was into meditation, a few years back. I have a track that helps with "memory and focus", and it has a couple of key instructions that have indeed proven useful. It gives you a couple of triggers. One is placing your thumb and index finger to your forehead to recall information. It seems effective, and often when I struggle with remembering something (like where my keys are, or the name of a movie or actor), I can bring my hand to my forehead and it just pops in. It seems to dissolve distractions for just a moment, enough for me to pull the answer out.

Hypnosis doesn't work on everyone, especially not in their first exposure to it.

Hypnosis will not cure cancer, but it can help to raise spirits significantly and that can aid in curing cancer. I know a meditation teacher out of Toronto that comes into my office to do meditation sessions. She releases guided meditation CDs that are intended for cancer patients and she has seen successes. The CDs say right on them that they are not intended to cure cancer, but they are intended to lift you up so that you can fight it at an emotional and 'spiritual' level (my words, not hers).

And 99% of her work is quite legitimate. Lots of hypnotists offer recordings for things like this, but I assume that's only because there's demand for it.

Firstly... science has for more than half a century been equipped with tools to differentiate low success rate from zero success rate. Having a low success rate does not excuse anything, or make it immune to scientific analysis.

Now, I will go as far as saying that there is a mental state (as defined by various brain scans) that is associated with some forms of hypnosis. I glanced at some papers that suggest you can alleviate pain using hypnosis... maybe I believe that too. However, taking that as evidence for the greater concept of hypnosis doesn't hold water. To the extent that hypnosis is equivalent to the placebo effect, I believe in it. Any extensions to that as advocated by quacks like Wendi Friesen I would not believe in until scientific evidence turns up for it.

Cool; no one said it did.

Do you believe that invasive surgery can be done using hypnosis as the only anesthetic?

As for "science", I haven't seen any yet, only opinion. I'm still curious what everyone thinks of the Mr. Wright case, and whether or not you accept that subconscious beliefs can strongly affect physical change. This is just the placebo effect, too.

Not my field, so I believe nothing. I don't remember the pain circuitry well enough to know whether such thing is possible. One word of caution though is that even if you make the subject ignore the pain, the periphery will still experience it and you are liable to get phantom pain side-effects. Hypnosis would have to operate on the level of dorsal root ganglia to be truly effective.

Given that we still have cancer and we don't melt tumors like snowballs on stoves, I think the story is bogus. It's a single datapoint and the methodology used in that case study seemed very bizarre. It all could have been a coincidence and without further repetition, I see no evidence that it was anything but that.

A low success rate that is distinguishable from no effect at all?
It's easy enough to do the control experiment, all you need is enough cancer patients. Hell, the existing medical records may be good enough for such a study (I don't know).
There is anecdotal evidence about cancer going into spontaneous remission, which should be perfectly possible but also very rare (but the sample of patients is large enough that you might see it some times).

Placebo effect is still an effect. The relevant question is to what extent the body's own immune system is able to overcome a disease. Stress reduces the effectiveness of the immune system, so reducing that will increase your chances.
To show that something is effective as a treatment it needs to perform better than a placebo, not as good as a placebo.

The interesting thing is, one (or more? Can't remember) study showed that the placebo effect is still in effect when the subject knows they are getting a placebo. I found that interesting.