A review of the effects of hypnosis on the immune system in breast cancer patients.

In order to make a recommendation about the use of hypnosis as adjuvant therapy in the treatment of breast cancer, 2 studies assessing the immunological effects of hypnosis in patients with early stage breast cancer were evaluated: (a) an experiment that taught hypnotic guided-imagery therapy to patients and (b) one that provided participants with home visits and autogenic training. Both investigations demonstrated improvement in depression and increased natural killer (NK) cell counts after 2 months of hypnosis treatment. However, neither study determined the clinical significance of hypnosis in the setting of cancer, and therefore future experiments are needed to relate the immune-mediated effects of hypnosis to hard clinical outcomes like survival rates.

Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2007 Oct;55(4):411-25. Hudacek KD. University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. hudacek@mail.med.upenn.edu