Re:No scientific content... (Score 1)

If you were to read the cognitive neuroscience literature, you might not be so quick to dismiss hypnosis as a scientific phenomenon.

For example, here's evidence that hypnotic suggestion can reduce the Stroop effect, an incredibly robust and well-established index of automatic cognitive processing. And a 1998 article from MIT Press's Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience finds that hypnosis is accompanied by "significant increases in both occipital regional cerebral blood flow and delta EEG activity."

To deny that hypnotic suggestion is real is nearly equivalent to denying that people can be persuaded to see things differently when they've been made very relaxed. That said, the study in question may be unscientific because of other methodological reasons, but the use of hypnosis does not immediately mean it's bad science.