MORE COMMENTS ABOUT SMOKING CESSATION

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Permalink Reply by Doreen Cohanim C.Ht on March 12, 2010 at 7:16pm

Dear Susan, I was here when you started this discussion, that's all I am going to say.

All the best, Doreen Cohanim C.Ht

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Permalink Reply by Rob McKeon on March 13, 2010 at 6:59am

Hi Doreen, sorry if I wasn't clear. No Smoking cessation treatment takes 6 to 12 months, those are the time periods at which behaviour is measured subsequent to treatment. The issue isn't how long it takes for a person to officially quit, but how enduring the change is. What is the value of somebody "quitting" smoking for a day, a week or a month? Just because your clients officially quit at some point during your sessions with them ought not to be a measure of how successful you are at helping clients become non-smokers.

With your measure of outcome you can walk through your locality and see someone you worked with puffing away on a cigarette and tell a friend "There's another of my 99% successes, when he has finished his fag I'll ask him for a testimonial for my website." :)

So the issue I was raising was the definition of quit rates. Facilitating people to quit for a few weeks is not a very useful service, and not what the client comes for. A more sensible perspective on success rates is the extent of smoking behaviour 6 and 12 months later. This better encapsulates a meaningful assessment of quitting smoking as a long term goal.

Now I'm not suggesting that you or any other hypnotherapist ought to feel it's incumbent upon you to assess such outcomes of clients after 6 and 12 months. That can be left to researchers and researcher-practitioners, but in the absence of assessing at those time periods an individual hypnotherapist is going to be quoting success figures which make hypnotherapy look like magic compared to every other treatment in the world.

To quote Alladin, Sabatini, and Amundson from their 2007 paper "What Should We Mean by Empirical Validation in Hypnotherapy: Evidence-Based Practice in Clinical Hypnosis" in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis:
"In regard to responsibility to society, empirical methods and our research base ought to be brought to bear in order to:
- Promote a prudent, even conservative, view of hypnosis regarding its role in particular treatments.
- Counter or address representations of hypnosis that have yet to be shown to be valid or reliable or that misrepresent what is known about hypnosis" (pp.126-127).

I accept completely that you are being genuine about your figures and are promoting them in good faith, but I believe your method of outcome assessment is flawed in the sense that it conflicts with how the outcome is assessed for smoking cessation for every other treatment being offered it.

Hence it may be viewed by those who are incredulous at the figures as being unhelpful in the grand scheme of things. Let's say that I am offering a smoking cessation programme that is multimodal and that I have spent a great deal of time putting together having studied the bulk of smoking cessation and nicotine dependence scientific research, and using various methods drawn from by background in psychology, addiction, psychotherapy, and hypnotherapy. If a client asks about likely success rate the answer I give will pale in comparison to the hypnotherapist who proudly claims 95% success on their website.

So is it helpful that some hypnotherapists define success in a way which is entirely different to how it is defined by everybody else in the health care field? And is it helpful to define success in a way which most clients probably don't mean when they say that they want to quit smoking?

It's a personal decision, I'm just giving my perspective. It's not my intention to criticise anyone, but rather draw attention to some points of contention.

Rob

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Permalink Reply by Susan French on March 13, 2010 at 12:34pm

Thank you Rob for you thoughts on this. Whenever any idea is put forward that anything about human behavior is simple, easy and fast, my automatic skepticism is aroused.

Susan

Rob McKeon said:

Hi Doreen, sorry if I wasn't clear. No Smoking cessation treatment takes 6 to 12 months, those are the time periods at which behaviour is measured subsequent to treatment. The issue isn't how long it takes for a person to officially quit, but how enduring the change is. What is the value of somebody "quitting" smoking for a day, a week or a month? Just because your clients officially quit at some point during your sessions with them ought not to be a measure of how successful you are at helping clients become non-smokers.

With your measure of outcome you can walk through your locality and see someone you worked with puffing away on a cigarette and tell a friend "There's another of my 99% successes, when he has finished his fag I'll ask him for a testimonial for my website." :)

So the issue I was raising was the definition of quit rates. Facilitating people to quit for a few weeks is not a very useful service, and not what the client comes for. A more sensible perspective on success rates is the extent of smoking behaviour 6 and 12 months later. This better encapsulates a meaningful assessment of quitting smoking as a long term goal.

Now I'm not suggesting that you or any other hypnotherapist ought to feel it's incumbent upon you to assess such outcomes of clients after 6 and 12 months. That can be left to researchers and researcher-practitioners, but in the absence of assessing at those time periods an individual hypnotherapist is going to be quoting success figures which make hypnotherapy look like magic compared to every other treatment in the world.

To quote Alladin, Sabatini, and Amundson from their 2007 paper "What Should We Mean by Empirical Validation in Hypnotherapy: Evidence-Based Practice in Clinical Hypnosis" in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis:
"In regard to responsibility to society, empirical methods and our research base ought to be brought to bear in order to:
- Promote a prudent, even conservative, view of hypnosis regarding its role in particular treatments.
- Counter or address representations of hypnosis that have yet to be shown to be valid or reliable or that misrepresent what is known about hypnosis" (pp.126-127).

I accept completely that you are being genuine about your figures and are promoting them in good faith, but I believe your method of outcome assessment is flawed in the sense that it conflicts with how the outcome is assessed for smoking cessation for every other treatment being offered it.

Hence it may be viewed by those who are incredulous at the figures as being unhelpful in the grand scheme of things. Let's say that I am offering a smoking cessation programme that is multimodal and that I have spent a great deal of time putting together having studied the bulk of smoking cessation and nicotine dependence scientific research, and using various methods drawn from by background in psychology, addiction, psychotherapy, and hypnotherapy. If a client asks about likely success rate the answer I give will pale in comparison to the hypnotherapist who proudly claims 95% success on their website.

So is it helpful that some hypnotherapists define success in a way which is entirely different to how it is defined by everybody else in the health care field? And is it helpful to define success in a way which most clients probably don't mean when they say that they want to quit smoking?

It's a personal decision, I'm just giving my perspective. It's not my intention to criticise anyone, but rather draw attention to some points of contention.

Rob

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Permalink Reply by Doreen Cohanim C.Ht on March 13, 2010 at 2:56pm

Thank you Rob,
I am glad that you were able to come back and clear the cloud :) also when you believe in your personal decision, by giving your perspectives, and of course without the intention to criticize anyone, rather draw attention to some points of contention, Then I suggest you avoid using names, which this was what you did, by simply pointing your frustration towards me. But I am nice, I know you didn't mean to Insult me...

And FYI, I don't post every testimonial to make me look good, not sure about others, but this is just me, In fact i have not even had time to post my clients testimonials yet, and I still get to help my clients and I still get word to mouth referral especially from professional health care providers.

Also back to research, I learned that smoking is an habit, addiction to tobacco is a possibility, but it is nothing to compare with drug addictions, such as heavy medications that involves heavy chemicals, or drugs like cocaine, and even weed, those are much complicated then smoking cigarettes, and I am only talking about cigarettes.

And for your Information I always do own research and not everything out on the Internet is 100% , they are facts based on personal experiances too , and how many times you had resurch but the out come was diffrent? I suspect too many times, and with all respect to your fact and resurch, not all are 100% solid, and if you take all the hypnotherapist who help clients with stop smoking amd if they do it the right way, you will see that hypnosis is one of the best affective stop smoking methoud, without withdrowls and side affects.

Doreen Cohanim C.Ht
www.HypnoCruise.com

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