Now, if a patient undergoes hypnotic, or any other alternative treatment, and the tumour disappears over the space of a few weeks, or even months, or even overnight, then the medical response is invariably 'spontaneous remission'.

If the patient is also receiving medical treatment at the same time as hypnosis, then the medical treatment always gets the credit - even, in one case I read about, where the last medical intervention was over two years previously and no positive change had taken place during that two years.

Mention the idea of using hypnosis to cure cancer and most of the medical world is up in arms, predictably claiming that there is no evidence. There is actually a lot of evidence. But what the medical world wants are controlled clinical trials like they have with drugs.

There are a few problems with that.

Drug companies are hugely wealthy and pay for their own clinical trials for new drugs, and, it appears on more than one occasion, massage the results of these trials to show their product up in a much better light than the evidence demonstrates. So clinical trials aren't necessarily the proof they claim to be. Hypnotherapists are generally individuals working alone and unable to fund rigorous clinical trials.

But then there is the Catch-22. The medical world wants clinical trials before it will accept anything new from outside the world of medicine, even though many of the treatments that doctors prescribe and the surgical techniques they use have never been tested in a way that proves their efficacy.

But any trial has to be approved by an ethics committee.

To prove the case for hypnotherapy, such a trial would have to find a large number of people all suffering from life-threatening and painful diseases, separate them into statistically similar groups, keep one untreated, treat another with surgery, drugs or radiation, another group just with hypnotherapy, and yet other groups would need to be 'tricked' into believing they were being treated when they weren't (this is necessary to eliminate the placebo effect). All this is despite the fact that the New England Journal of Medicine (1992) stated "For most of today's common solid cancers, the ones that cause 90% of the cancer deaths every year - most breast, lung, colon and rectal, skin, liver, pancreatic and bladder cancers - chemotherapy has never been proved to do any good at all."

Nevertheless, the very fact that treatment would need to be withheld from many people who were in desperate need of help means that it would be considered unethical. And so the medical world has created a set of rules that prevent anyone from ever proving to their satisfaction that anything other than medical treatment is effective. Their reason: there is no scientific proof that anything else works.

I know from personal experience in my work as a Hypnotherapist that I have successfully cured what was diagnosed as incurable, and in the space of a few minutes completely removed pain that was unresponsive to prescribed medication. I know that many other hypnotherapists also achieve these 'magical' results.

I am also aware that when I do hands on healing, without the use of hypnosis, I can get similarly magical results. I just can't guarantee them.

The world of Medicine seems quite blinkered and threatened by this sort of occurrence. It digs its heels in when the rational i.e. scientific mind, fails to make sense of what is observed. And when Medicine's rational mind feels threatened it moves into a state that psychiatrists call denial.

A pioneer for what is now known as psychoneuroimmunology, Dr O. Carl Simonton (oncologist) worked with a group of patients using similar techniques to those now used in hypnotherapy. Every patient in this group was diagnosed with a medically incurable, terminal, disease. Four years later over 20% had no sign of disease, almost 20% had a tumour regressing, and in almost 30% the disease was stable.

Impressive results more than three years after they all were supposed to have died.

Impressive results for something that there is no evidence that it works.

The human body is an incredible healing machine. Hypnosis can remove the blocks to healing that allow the machine to do what it knows how to do - and that is to be well and healthy.

"The discovery of a pill or a machine that could cure or alleviate as many diseases as hypnosis is known to be able to do would earn a fortune for its inventor." (G.L. Playfair)

Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More (Book) Authors:Joe Vitale, Ihaleakala Hew Len Manufacturer:Wiley Released:29 June, 2007