What Is the Scientific Evidence for Relaxation Therapies?
Although many studies have been performed on relaxation therapies, most of them suffer from inadequate design. To be fair, there are considerable difficulties in the path of any researcher who wishes to scientifically assess the effectiveness of a relaxation therapy such as hypnosis. There are several factors involved, but the most important is fairly fundamental: it isn’t easy to design a proper double-blind, placebo-controlled study of relaxation therapy. Researchers studying the herb St. John’s wort, for example, can use placebo pills that are indistinguishable from the real thing. However, it’s difficult to design a form of placebo relaxation therapy that can’t be detected as such by both practitioners and patients. One very clever method used by some researchers involves the use of intentionally neutral visualizations. Instead of imagining lying in bed and sleeping peacefully, patients in the placebo group might be told to visualize something like a green box. The problem here is
