"Even programs that do last a year aren't necessarily better," Phillips wrote. "Anyone can learn to guide another into trance. The art of the skill is learning how to best utilize the trance … . This often simply takes experience but it really requires guided instruction with plenty of practice within the classroom where there are willing volunteers and an instructor who is looking out for the interests of the students and their trance partners."
Timothy Huang, who has a doctorate in chemistry, compares hypnotherapy to alchemy, itself not a science but an essential precursor to the Scientific Revolution. Though hypnosis has been used in a clinical setting for centuries, hypnotherapy is still more art than science.
"How can we be sure that the reply from the subject is really from their memory, not from their willingness or hyper-suggestibility," Huang said in a phone interview Sunday. "We really don't know."
He uses a brainwave machine with a personal computer to show clients they have entered a hypnotic state. "If a reply is from his memory there won't be any strong beta wave activity, but if he is making up the story then we can see some beta waves coming up," he said. (When brain waves are measured, the beta frequency indicates a person is in an alert waking state.)
However, Huang cautions that this method has yet to be validated, a task for which other hypnotherapists say much more advanced brain imaging machines, which are currently too expensive for private practice, may be needed. "It's more or less … an empirical formula," Huang said, but acknowledged that much work remains to be done.
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