Alongside, Never Instead: How Hypnosis Can Help During Cancer Treatment
Breast Cancer Awareness Month feels like the right time to write honestly about something that often goes wrong in conversations about complementary approaches to cancer care. So let me start with what hypnosis cannot do.
What Hypnosis Cannot Do
Hypnosis does not treat cancer. It does not shrink a tumour, and it does not stand in for surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. If you ever meet a practitioner of anything who suggests otherwise, please walk away. Politely, if you like. But walk away.
What Hypnosis Can Do
What hypnosis can do is help the person who is going through the treatment.
That is not a small thing. Anyone who has been through cancer care, or sat beside someone who has, knows the treatment itself is only part of it. There is the waiting. The scans, the blood draws, the port being fitted. The nausea some people begin to feel on the drive in, before anything has been given. The hot flashes at three in the morning. A tiredness that sleep does not touch.
Those are the parts hypnosis is good at.
What the Research Says
This is not only a clinical opinion. In 2022, the Society for Integrative Oncology, working with the American Society of Clinical Oncology -- the cancer specialists' own professional body -- reviewed the research on complementary approaches to cancer pain. Hypnosis came out with a recommendation for pain during procedures: biopsies, port placements, the needle work that cancer care is full of. A year later, the same partnership looked at anxiety and depression, and hypnosis was recommended again, this time for anxiety during procedures.
Both were moderate-strength recommendations, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than overstating it. But for a field many people still picture with a swinging watch, having cancer specialists put their name to it matters.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Mostly, it looks like learning to do something for yourself.
The aim is to teach you a way into a calm, focused state that you can reach on your own, shaped around what you are actually facing -- the infusion chair, the scanner, the heat that wakes you at night. You leave with a recording to use at home, or in the chair during treatment.
Because all sessions happen entirely by Zoom, they take place wherever you are -- and during treatment that matters more than it might at other times. No waiting room. No drive home when you are already wiped out. On a bad day, you can do it from the sofa.
A Note for Carers
If you are reading this as the person beside someone with cancer -- the one who drives, waits, and remembers the appointments -- some of this applies to you too. Carers carry their own version of all of it, and they are rarely the ones anybody asks about.
One Request
Whatever approach you choose, please tell your oncology team. Not as a formality, but so that everyone looking after you knows the whole picture. The good ones will be glad to hear it.
Would you like to talk through how hypnosis might help you or someone you care for?
The call is complimentary and there is no obligation.
