Hypnosis for stopping allergies?

I think it would never work like that. If that were the case, then how would you explain children who have allergies? It’s not something in your head, though I think a person’s reaction to their allergies could be what makes a person more miserable.

I didn’t start to develop allergies until I was in my 40’s and the same for my husband. He suddenly became allergic to cats after hanging around a friend home who had cats. It kept getting worse and worse for him. Mine was pollen, until I learned the more you work outside in the garden the more you build up a resistance to outdoor pollen. The same concept of allergies shots. I was miserable the first season, and the second time it was a little less and now its hardly noticeable. Runny nose here and there.

My daughter did allergy shots and it helped her a lot but they didn’t help my husband. It made him sick all the time and more sensitive to cats.
None of these really get rid of allergies, they just reduce your bodies reaction to it, leading to lessened symptoms.
I still occasionally get a slight reaction to pollen and sometimes no reaction. My go-to for remedies is usually taking plenty of vitamin C and drinking ginger tea. Both help with lessening my runny nose which can lead to a chest cold or congestion. I also do eye drops. As we age many of us end up producing fewer tears and need eye drops to help keep our eyes moist and we think the dry eyes are from pollen when it’s just dry eyes. Though a lot of allergy medicines can also leave you feeling dry-eyed. The same way they dry your sinuses they dry your eyes.

That’s not how it works but you could get some placebo effect from this I suppose. My wife tried everything, even allergy shots to no avail. The only thing she said worked to make it tolerable for her was unfiltered local honey. Researchers say it does not work but it does for her. It’s not placebo either, the effects are dramatic. I suspect their assumptions for how, when, where, and who it works on are just incorrect.

I do think the power of the mind could reduce her anxiety/hyperfixation on it, which could be beneficial. And if she is willing and susceptible to hypnosis, it couldnt hurt.
My husband loves hypnosis and every time we go he vokunteers. He quit smoking for a long time after a few different sessions.

Note: I had bad allergies and was allergic to cat dander. I took claritin for one year and it all went away. I quit the script and theyve never came back-and I have my beautiful cats. :)

I don’t know of any evidence that hypnosis works for anything, let alone allergies. But I could see a scenario where something like CBT might help with dealing with the symptoms of allergies.

A better plan would be to see an allergist to talk about medication or immunotherapy.

All, The article I linked talks about studies that address how our minds cause some of the symptoms and some that talk about hypnosis having worked in some cases. Classical Conditioning or Behaviorism can cause us to have reactions that have nothing to do with an actual physical issue.

@Pandora I’m not suggesting we create allergies in our minds (such as children with allergies showing this isn’t the case), but our minds can be used to control them. I used to be allergic to several different pollens like ragweed and a few others as well as cat dander. If I got around a cat my sinuses would fill up, my eyes would swell…it was miserable. I spent a lot of time taking OTC allergy medicines that would help with the symptoms but made me feel like crap. One day I thought about it and thought that a piece of dander or pollen was nothing that could hurt me. My body could absorb it and not miss a beat. In realized my immune system was acting way over the top giving me the massive reactions I was experiencing. So I determined I was not going to take any more OTC meds and would only blow my nose until either my immune system realized it could stand down for these things or until my nose fell off. 2 weeks later I had no more reactions like this. I even had cats as pets for a long time.

@Caravanfan Talking to an allergist has been done and leads to no real solutions. We’ve tried various things but they all lead back to no resolution.

As for no evidence, again, I would refer you to the article. Here are some of the studies that are cited:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15832067/

https://journals.lww.com/bsam/abstract/1969/03000/the_mechanism_of_action_of_suggestion_in_the.7.aspx

@seawulf575 Yeah, I’m not necessarily opposed to the use of it. I’m just being a hard-core scientist skeptic here as I’ve never read good data to support the use of hypnosis for anything. I read the psychology today article and that’s obviously just an opinion piece. The first pubmed article you cited is underpowered and based upon retrospective symptom analysis. Also, the full article is not available unless you pay for it which to me is always a red flag. The second article is not even about hypnosis.

I’ll say that psychologic research is hard to do really good science on. Unlike something like coronary artery disease, psychologic issues are not as easily measured and are by nature subject to all kinds of biases. That doesn’t make them useless, just harder to do well.

For example the first study is a “randomized controlled intervention study”. Okay so far so good. How did they randomize people and what did they randomize them to? That’s not mentioned in the abstract. They had 79 randomized. What were the two arms of the study? Hypnosis and no hyponsis? Only 52 completed two sessions. And they relied on diaries and retrospective assessments. That’s subject to confirmation bias, recall bias, and other biases. And they go further to say in the abstract that daily self reports don’t show an improvement.

So, yeah. (I’m metaphorically waving my arms). That doesn’t really help. But again, self-hypnosis is a harmless intervention at worse and a form of meditation or CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) at best. So as long as you’re not eschewing a medical intervention that could help and the condition is not dangerous then knock yourself out.

@Caravanfan I’m not looking at faith healing or any other quackery like that. I don’t like Chiropractics. I am intrigued, however, by things like acupressure and hypnosis. Acupressure I’ve actually had done on me and I see it as a temporary relief from pain. Not a cure, just a “band-aid”. I’ve seen hypnosis work for entertainment so I can imagine it could be used for other applications. And given that the placebo effect is a real thing, it tells me that our minds can fool us despite all the factual things involved. It is that sort of reasoning that brings me to this thinking about allergies.

@seawulf575 Glad you’re not thinking about chiropractors as they are dangerous and scary. In terms of the placebo effect being powerful, well, not really. Most if not all of the placebo effect is basically a statistical regression to the mean. But as I said, as long as the allergies aren’t dangerous it’s fine. Certainly meds have adverse reactions and hypnosis doesn’t. So if it works, great!