Gut-directed hypnotherapy for IBS: should it be the treatment of choice?
Dipesh Vasant, Jane Boissiere and Peter Whorwell argue that gut-directed hypnotherapy should be offered routinely as part of integrated care in gastroenterology departments, and explicitly not as a stand-alone treatment.
The take
Whorwell's group has built this evidence base over decades, so the argument carries weight that ordinary advocacy does not. Note the framing the authors reject outright: stand-alone treatment. That is precisely the pitch most hypnotherapists bring to medical referrers, and precisely why it lands badly. Positioned as an adjunct inside integrated care, the same conversation tends to go somewhere.