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A friend of mine is researching for an article she wants to write about hypnotherapy and the benefits for alleviating or curing allergies. She has a severe allergy to nuts (the food, not types of people !)

Anyone got any experience? comments?

Also are there any hypnotherapy forums or similar that she could post a request for information ?

Has she checked out Pub Med? Best place to start. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

Is this even possible? I always believed that hypnosis was psychological, and allergies were physiological, so no matter how much you say to yourself "I'm not allergic" it would still affect you

I suspect people could have psychological reactions to certain substances that would mimic physiological allergic reactions.

Mr_Grue wrote:I suspect people could have psychological reactions to certain substances that would mimic physiological allergic reactions.

Would it be dangerous though, if it were actually a physical reaction and you tried to eat said substance?

I'm just curious

Anthony Jacquin might be a good person to ask.

Anna wrote:Would it be dangerous though, if it were actually a physical reaction and you tried to eat said substance?

Yes. Yes it would.

YOu'd be looking at a very limited circumstance of knowing you had a psyhosomatic allergy; if you responded when you merely thought what you were eating had the allergen in, or if you didn't respond when you didn't know it had the allergen in, or if you didn't respond when the allergen was "all mixed in."

Be on standby with an epi-pen and you'll be fine



please note: any advice given by greedoniz is throughly irresponsible

As I understand it hypnosis (or any other relaxation technique) will help you control the symptoms. But it will not remove the alergy.

If you read any good hypnotherapy book then you will find that they say that hypnotherapy can often treat the symptoms but it cannot treat, and should not be used to treat the cause.

A nut allergy is essentially a toxic reaction to nuts, a form of poisoning if you like. People with nut allergies may not be allergic to all types of nut and may have eaten nuts for a substantial part of their lives before the allegy sets in.

Hypnotherapy cannot be used as a remedy for this and other similar conditions. To try and do so is dangerous and potentially lethal.

If you want a good source of information on what hypnotheray can be useful for, then I recommend reading 'Post Hypnotic Instructions - how to give post-hypnotic suggestions for therapeutic purposes' by Arnold Furst (ISBN 0-87980-119-0).

The book assumes that you are already a hypnotist so is no good if you're not.

Robert Dilts has an NLP process based on the idea that an allergy can be treated like a phobia:

http://www.nlpu.com/Articles/article9.htm

I haven't tried this with any clients and I certainly don't think it should be relied on for something severe like a nut allergy. But I do think that hypnotherapy, NLP and the other related techniques that I use could be useful where the allergy has a major psychological component. My own sensitivity to tobacco smoke is a good example; I only used to have to see or smell a cigarette near me and I was liable to have an asthma attack, but it was definitely a phobic response rather than a genuine allergic one.

Barry

www.magicofthemind.co.uk

I've also discovered a chapter on allergies in a book I've just started reading - "Mind-Probe Hypnosis" by Irene Hickman. She reports success in treating allergies through regression techniques.

Barry

I know there are lots of case histories of asthma being cured by hypnosis. Asthma, of course, has a powerful psychological component.

In one of my old hypnosis books are several case studies of people with apparent allergies who were cured by hypnosis, but these were all psychosomatic cases. A phobia of dogs, for instance, being expressed as an allergy to dogs.

I believe that the subconscious mind has a lot more control over the body than we tend to think. I can envisage hypnosis being used to complement physical treatment of allergies. For instance, during desensitisation therapy (injection of small amounts of allergen), the patient could be led to visualise the allergen as a friendly substance and the antibodies standing down instead of attacking. Kind of the reverse of the way it's used in cancer therapy.

i agree in some ways, i was born with asthma...though im a little better with my relationship towards my inhaler - even now, if i pop down the road without it...mild panic can often set in...cos in my mind "i don't have my inhaler" can go on repeat..and thus cause me to tense up and get wheezy...

so the self induced stress of not having my inhaler (and only being 5 minutes walk away from it) takes over...much better than i was though...as a kid, i couldnt move around the house without knowning where my inhaler was...