Whats the go with NLP?

Great Debates
21

I actually was fascinated by NLP as a teen, and I don’t remember it ever positing to do anything with actual physical illnesses.

I also know that the eye-desensitization thing has been shown to not work in clinical trials. The rest of it seems to be an attempt to use waking hypnosis and subliminal messaging to affect change more rapidly than traditional psychology. I know the latter is bunkum, but the former might have some loose merit.

I personally am under the impression that any NLP cure is really just a magic ritual cure–one where the personality of the practictioner and the placebo effect convince the person that they’ve been cured. In mental illness, thinking you are cured can actually be a cure, if you want to think about that way. But there’s no way it can do anything physical.

What Uniqueorn is positing is that you can control your antibodies with your mind. While maybe the immune system in general might be able to be modulated that way, I don’t see how antibodies in particular could be.

EDIT: WhyNot’s post wasn’t there before I posted, but I stand by it. Pavlovian conditioning is not the source of allergies. Also, anchoring is not strictly Pavlovian conditioning. It is supposed to be accelerated by a mild hypnotic state induced in the client.

22

I don’t think I mentioned anything about being able to control antibodies with your mind.

AliveNot gave a pretty good explanation of how to apply the NLP allergy approach. It works really well for many people and when I had my cat allergy (puffy eyes, breathing problems, rash) and met a girl with two cats I could either have said that we were not supposed to be together or see if I could do something about it.

And whether is worked because NLP is so great or because it was through the power of my personality, doesn’t really matter to me. It worked for me and for quite a few other people and I can live with that.

I think the important bit is being flexible enough to allow for the possibility that some approaches might work where others don’t. Not all allopathic cures work, not all complementary ones do. And if it is a case of just finding the right placebo, then that’s good, as long as the end result is the one you want.

All I’m saying is give placebo a chance! :wink:

23

I think you are probably thinking of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming), which is a completely different thing from NLP. NLP also has stuff to say about eye movements, but it the claims are quite different. EMDR is primarily a treatment for traumatic stress disorder (and perhaps some other, related psychopathologies). Its practitioners (most of them, anyway - there may be a few loons) do not make anything like the sort of wide ranging claims that are made for NLP.

Contrary to your apparent claim, many clinical (and experimental) trials have shown that EMDR does work, at least to a degree. (I am not saying that it is necessarily the most effective form of treatment for PTSD, but it does have a positive effect, and seemingly more of a positive effect than several other types of treatment that have been tried):
[ul]
[li]Carlson, J., Chemtob, C., Rusnak, K., Hedlund, N., & Muraoka, M. (1998). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Treatment for Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Journal of Traumatic Stress (11 #1) 3-24.[/li][li]Van Etten, M. & Taylor, S. (1998). Comparative Efficacy of Treatments for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: A Meta-Analysis. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy (5) 126-144.[/li][li]Shepherd, J., Stein, K., & Milne, R. (2000). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing in the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Review of an Emerging Therapy. Psychological Medicine (30 #4) 863-871.[/li][li]Power, K., McGoldrick, T., Brown, K., Buchanan, R., Sharp, D., Swanson, V., & Karatzias, A. (2002). A Controlled Comparison of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Versus Exposure Plus Cognitive Restructuring Versus Waiting List in the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy (9 #5) 299-318.[/li][li]APA (2006). American Psychiatric Association Practice Guidelines for the Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: Compendium 2006. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association.[/li][li]Bisson, J.I., Ehlers, A., Matthews, R., Pilling, S., Richards, D., & Turner, S. (2007). Psychological Treatments for Chronic Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. British Journal of Psychiatry (190) 97-104.[/li][li]Rodenburg, R., Benjamin, A., de Roos, C., Meijer, A.M., & Stams, G.J. (2009). Efficacy of EMDR in Children: A Meta-Analysis. Clinical Psychology Review (29) 599-606.[/li][li]Kemp, M., Drummond, P., & McDermott, B. (2010). A Wait-List Controlled Pilot Study of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) for Children with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Symptoms from Motor Vehicle Accidents. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry (15 #1) 5-25.[/li][/ul]
This citation list could be considerably extended. There are a handful of studies that find little or no evidence for the technique’s positive effect, or that it has less effect than certain other treatments to which it is being compared, but the weight of the evidence seems to be quite strongly in its favor.

By contrast, the NLP claim (which, I think, is quite an important aspect of NLP) that the direction of a persons’ gaze is indicative of the sensory modality of their mental imagery (i.e., whether their thoughts are visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, or whatever) has not stood up to experimental test, and is not consistent with what is otherwise known about gaze direction during mental imagery.
[ul]
[li]Elich M. Thompson R.W. & Miller L. (1985). Mental imagery as revealed by eye movements and spoken predicates: A test of neurolinguistic programming. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 32(4), 622-625.[/li][li]Laeng, B. & Teodorescu, D.-S. (2002). Eye Scanpaths During Visual Imagery Reenact those of Perception of the Same Visual Scene. Cognitive Science (26) 207-231.[/li][li]Johansson, R., Holšánová, J., & Holmqvist, K. (2006). Pictures and Spoken Descriptions Elicit Similar Eye Movements During Mental Imagery, Both in Light and in Complete Darkness. Cognitive Science (30) 1053-1079.[/li][li]Johansson, R., Holšánová, J., Dewhurst, R. & Holmqvist, K. (2012). Eye Movements During Pictorial Recall Have a Functional Role, but They Are Not Reinstatements of Those from Encoding. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (38 #5) 1289-1314.[/li][/ul]
In short, NLP is probably hokum, EMDR (“the eye-desensitization thing”) probably isn’t.