Help our profession: "browse"--to let the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine know the value of Hypnosis information.

Hypnotists/Hypnotherapists--We need to make ourselves known. One way to do that is for you to go to "Browse Popular Health Topics" section on the NCCAM Web site (at nccam.nih.gov). When you get there search for Hypnosis/Hypnotherapy. Your search will be counted and it will let the National Institutes of Health--Complimentary and Alternative Medicine know that hundreds of persons are searching for Hypnosis information.

Ask others to do the same. Please spread the word on your web sites and in your correspondences to everyone!

See the response below that I received when I asked: Why Hypnosis was not listed on the 'Browse Popular Health Topics.'

Dear Dr. Anne:

Thank you for your e-mail to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) asking why hypnosis is not listed in the "Browse Popular Health Topics" section on the NCCAM Web site (at nccam.nih.gov).

When choosing the topics to list in our "Browse Popular Health Topics" section, we looked at which pages on our site received the most "hits," or which terms were searched for the most once people got onto our Web site. Our purpose in creating this section was to help lead users more directly to the information for which they were looking. We check the number of hits on Web pages on a quarterly basis. Since we do not have a publication entirely on hypnosis, we did not have a reason to add this to our homepage.

Information about hypnosis can be found in the NCCAM background report "Mind-Body Medicine: An Overview" (on the "Health Information" page of our Web site at nccam.nih.gov/health under "Understanding CAM").

In addition, NCCAM is funding clinical research on hypnosis, and the clinical trial descriptions are at nccam.nih.gov/clinicaltrials (click on "All NCCAM Clinical Trials," and select "Hypnosis" from the list).

The distinguished lecture "Hypnosis and Group Support in Medical Care: Altering Perception and Reality," given by David Spiegel, M.D., may also be of interest to you. A link to the video-cast of this lecture can be found on the "Distinguished Lectures in the Science of Complementary and Alternative Medicine" page of the NCCAM Web site at nccam.nih.gov/news/lectures.

Thank you for your interest in NCCAM. Please contact us again if you need to know more or if anything here is not clear to you.

Sincerely yours,

Terry Evans 

NCCAM Clearinghouse, P.O. Box 7923

Gaithersburg, Maryland 20898-7923

Toll-free in the U.S.: 1-888-644-6226, International: 301-519-3153

TTY (for deaf and hard-of-hearing callers): 1-866-464-3615

Fax: [phone]

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is dedicated to exploring complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science, training complementary and alternative medicine researchers, and disseminating authoritative information to the public and professionals.