The Effect of Hypnotic Suggestion on Cognition, Sleep, Patient-Reported Outcomes, and Insight following Acquired Brain Injury

What is the downside of doing this before the additional RCT is never performed? 

The Effect of Hypnotic Suggestion on Cognition, Sleep, Patient-Reported Outcomes, and Insight following Acquired Brain Injury

The Effect of Hypnotic Suggestion on Cognition, Sleep, Patient-Reported Outcomes, and Insight following Acquired Brain Injury Hypnosis has been successfully applied in neurorehabilitation, including for motor disorders, aphasia, pain, and vertigo. However, cognitive rehabilitation using hypnosis has received little attention. Here, we report the data from two such studies on patients with chronic cognitive sequalae following acquired brain injury. Eight sessions of hypnotic suggestion yielded large effects on WAIS working memory (d = 1.65), progress on 87% of patient-reported outcomes, and four sessions reduced the need for sleep and rest with a median of 55 minutes per day. An exploratory factor analysis showed no relationship between objective improvements and perceived improvements, indicating large individual differences in the structure of the perceived improvements. This, in turn, indicate that subjective reports following hypnotic suggestion should be interpreted with caution. No adverse effects have been observed in these experiments or reported in the literature. Based on our findings and converging evidence from the literature, we conclude that hypnotic suggestion is a promising method in cognitive neurorehabilitation following acquired brain injury. However, the mechanism is currently unknown. We argue that it should be regarded as experimental until at least one further high-quality RCT is published. Data and analysis script are available at https://osf.io/sz6bw/ .