Does It Work?

Does Hypnosis Work for Quitting Smoking? No, and This Is the Page That Costs Me the Most to Write

This is the most valuable search this site could rank for and the one where the evidence is furthest against me. I sell a ten-session quit course for about A$244. Before you read a word about it, there is a free number that works better, and it goes here rather than at the bottom.

Written by Ernest McLeodClinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice. About Ernest →

I earn a commission when someone buys through this site, and the quit smoking course is the most expensive thing on it. That is precisely why the phone number is above the product. If this page costs me the sale, it costs me the sale.

What does the evidence on hypnosis for smoking actually say?

Cochrane has looked at this question directly, which is more than can be said for most things hypnosis is sold for. Barnes and colleagues published the current review in June 2019 — CD001008 — pooling 14 studies, 22 control comparisons and 1,926 participants.

Start with the quality of what went in. One study was at low risk of bias. Ten were at high risk. Three were unclear. That is the pile the answer has to be built from, and it explains most of what follows.

Their conclusion, word for word: “There is insufficient evidence to determine whether hypnotherapy is more effective for smoking cessation than other forms of behavioural support or unassisted quitting. If a benefit is present, current evidence suggests the benefit is small at most.” Their implications for practice are blunter still: “There is insufficient evidence to support the use of hypnotherapy as a specific treatment for smoking cessation.”

The best comparison in the review — against attention-matched behavioural support, six studies, 957 people — came out at a risk ratio of 1.21 (0.91 to 1.61). That interval crosses 1, so the result is compatible with no benefit at all. GRADE rated it low certainty; everything else in the review, very low.

What are Australian GPs told to do?

The RACGP’s Supporting smoking cessation: A guide for health professionals is the guideline your GP works from. Hypnotherapy appears in it, on pages 60 to 61, under a heading that does not need interpreting: “Ineffective approaches to smoking cessation”.

Their sentence: “A Cochrane meta-analysis was unable to show that hypnotherapy was superior to no treatment, and there are insufficient data to compare hypnotherapy with alternate effective treatments.” None of their sixteen graded recommendations mentions hypnotherapy anywhere.

One qualifier there deserves a fair hearing, because it is real and it is in my favour. Their subheading reads “Hypnotherapy (without counselling)”. The only pooled Cochrane result to reach significance was hypnosis as an adjunct to other support — RR 2.10, five studies, 224 people, four at high risk of bias, substantial heterogeneity.

Read that honestly and it cuts the other way. If the one signal appears when hypnosis is bolted onto counselling, the plainest explanation is that the benefit belongs to the counselling. Which is Quitline. Which is free.

What did the newest and largest look find?

In January 2025, Jackson and colleagues published in JAMA Network Open an analysis of 25,094 quit attempts from the Smoking Toolkit Study in England, covering 2006 to 2024. It is the largest real-world look at what people actually use and what happens next.

Two hundred and thirteen people had used hypnotherapy. Their unadjusted quit success was 14.5 per cent, against 18.0 per cent for people who used nothing at all. Fully adjusted for addiction level and other aids, the odds ratio came out at 0.79, with an interval of 0.52 to 1.22.

Then the part that matters most. The authors report “evidence to suggest there was no association between quit success and use (vs nonuse) of… hypnotherapy”. That phrasing is doing precise work: it is a Bayes-factor finding, which means evidence of absence, not merely absence of evidence.

The difference is the whole ball game. “We could not find an effect” can mean the study was too small to see one. “The data positively favour there being no effect” is a stronger claim, and stronger than Cochrane’s “insufficient evidence”. The fair caveat: this is observational and self-reported, not a randomised trial, and people who reach for hypnotherapy may differ from people who do not in ways no adjustment catches. It still points the same way as everything else here.

The most important sentence on this page was written by my own profession

Here is the line from the Cochrane review that I have never seen reproduced on a hypnotherapist’s website, mine included until now:

“Although many therapists offer hypnotherapy for smoking cessation… there is recognition that the success rates quoted by practitioners are likely to be exaggerated.”

Now look at what they cite for it: two references, Handel 2010 and Yager 2010, both published in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis. The field’s own journal, its own people, its own readership.

The charge that quit-smoking hypnosis is oversold did not come from sceptics or from the pharmaceutical industry. It came from inside the room. If you take one thing from this page other than the phone number, take that.

Disclosing everyone’s interests and not only my opponents’: one Cochrane author, Hayden McRobbie, has taken honoraria from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, who sell cessation products. Worth knowing. It does not touch fourteen risk-of-bias ratings, and it does not explain why the field’s own journal reached the same verdict.

Where did “three times better than patches” come from?

You will have met it. The advertisement runs: hypnosis is three times as effective as nicotine replacement and fifteen times as effective as quitting alone, from 600 studies of 72,000 people. It is on Australian clinic pages right now. The real paper is Viswesvaran and Schmidt, 1992, Journal of Applied Psychology 77:554–561. Three things about it.

1. It is not a medical journal. The Journal of Applied Psychology is an industrial and organisational psychology journal — workplaces, selection, personnel. Nothing wrong with that; it is simply not where a clinical cessation finding would live, and nobody quoting it says so.
2. The 600 and the 72,000 are the wrong denominator. They describe the whole review, across every cessation method it examined, not the hypnosis subset. That is the commonest trick in this field: borrow the big number from the paper and attach it to the small claim.
3. “Fifteen times” is not findable in the paper. A research pass could not locate it. I also will not point you at the 1992 magazine article usually cited alongside, because I could not verify that either, and debunking an unverified claim with an unverified source would be its own joke.

And the paper is paywalled. A claim recited across an entire industry for thirty-four years, sourced to a document almost nobody repeating it has read. I have not read the primary text either, and I am telling you so rather than pretending otherwise.

Its travelling companion is the 94 per cent success rate. That traces to von Dedenroth, an uncontrolled case series from the 1960s: a practitioner counting his own results, no control group, nobody checking. A number from before the moon landing, still on sales pages in 2026.

What actually works, with the numbers beside it

All of these are Cochrane reviews measuring abstinence at six months or longer, so they are directly comparable. The last row is the best case anyone can make for what I sell.

Now read it properly, because the obvious reading is the wrong one. Hypnotherapy’s 1.21 is not wildly below Quitline’s 1.38. On point estimates alone you might call it close.

The gap is in the last two columns. Nicotine replacement rests on 64,640 people at high certainty. Hypnotherapy rests on 957, mostly in studies at high risk of bias, rated low, with an interval that includes no effect. One of those numbers will hold still when more research arrives. The other is a coin balanced on its edge.

One more thing the table cannot show. Lindson’s 2023 network analysis ranked treatments by additional quitters per 100: eight for nicotine e-cigarettes, eight for varenicline, seven for cytisine, three for bupropion and fast-acting NRT, two for patches. Hypnotherapy does not appear in that network at all.

What this costs in Australia, and what it costs at a chemist

From 1 January 2026 the PBS co-payment is $25.00 general and $7.70 concessional. PBS-listed for cessation: nicotine patches, varenicline, bupropion and nortriptyline. Cytisine is registered here and pharmacist-only, but not PBS subsidised. I am deliberately not printing a brand name for it: the TGA’s own page is ambiguous about which name is current, and a wrong name at a pharmacy counter is worse than none.

So: a GP visit and a script puts a high-certainty treatment in your hand for $7.70 to $25.00. Quitline costs nothing. Ten sessions of hypnosis audio from this site costs about A$244.

The RACGP notes that unassisted quitting succeeds 3 to 5 per cent of the time. Quitting cold is not impossible, just a poor bet — which is the honest reason to use something rather than nothing.

On vaping, carefully, because the rules changed and the marketing has not caught up. Since 1 October 2024 nicotine vapes are pharmacy-only. No prescription for adults over 18; a prescription for under-18s or strengths above 20 mg/mL; mint, menthol and tobacco flavours only. They are unapproved therapeutic goods — anyone calling them “TGA approved” is wrong. Ask a pharmacist or GP, and see our vaping page.

So why is there a quit smoking course on this site at all?

Because people search for it, and because I would rather they found this page than the one with the 94 per cent on it. That is the whole of my defence and I am not going to dress it up.

The catalogue carries a ten-session Quit Smoking course at US$175.00 — about A$244 at the rate on 18 September 2026 — along with some single sessions at US$18.95, about A$27. There is a ninety-day refund window on all of it.

Here is the sentence I would want written if I were you. The quit smoking course is the most expensive thing on this website and the least supported thing on it. Every other category here has at least a thin, arguable evidence base. This one has a Cochrane review finding insufficient evidence, a national guideline filing it under ineffective, a 25,000-person study finding evidence of absence, and the field’s own journal conceding the success rates get exaggerated.

So do this instead, in this order. Ring 13 7848 and book the call-backs; free, high-certainty evidence. See a GP about varenicline, patches or bupropion; $7.70 to $25.00. If after both of those you still want twenty minutes of guided relaxation in your ears at eleven at night while you get through the first fortnight, the course will still be here. Buy it as a comfort measure alongside treatment, never as the treatment.

If that costs me the A$244, it costs me the A$244. I would rather sell fewer of these than run a page that sends someone out of here poorer and still smoking.

Common questions

Where these numbers come from

• Quit. Ways to get in touch – Quitline support [Internet]. Melbourne: Quit (Cancer Council Victoria); [cited 2026 Sep 24]. quit.org.au
• The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. Supporting smoking cessation: a guide for health professionals. 2nd ed. East Melbourne, Vic: RACGP; 2019 (updated 2021). racgp.org.au
• Barnes J, McRobbie H, Dong CY, et al. Hypnotherapy for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2019;6(6):CD001008. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD001008.pub3
• Jackson SE, Brown J, Buss V, et al. Prevalence of popular smoking cessation aids in England and associations with quit success. JAMA Netw Open. 2025;8(1):e2454962. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.54962
• Handel DL. Follow-up review of the success rates of hypnosis. Commentary. Am J Clin Hypn. 2010;52(3):173-5. doi:10.1080/00029157.2010.10401716
• Yager EK. Follow-up review of the success rates of hypnosis. Am J Clin Hypn. 2010;52(3):167. doi:10.1080/00029157.2010.10401713
• Viswesvaran C, Schmidt FL. A meta-analytic comparison of the effectiveness of smoking cessation methods. J Appl Psychol. 1992;77(4):554-61. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.77.4.554
• Livingstone-Banks J, Fanshawe TR, Thomas KH, et al. Nicotine receptor partial agonists for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2023;5(5):CD006103. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD006103.pub8
• Hajizadeh A, Howes S, Theodoulou A, et al. Antidepressants for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2023;5(5):CD000031. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD000031.pub6
• Hartmann-Boyce J, Chepkin SC, Ye W, et al. Nicotine replacement therapy versus control for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2018;5(5):CD000146. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD000146.pub5
• Matkin W, Ordóñez-Mena JM, Hartmann-Boyce J. Telephone counselling for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2019;5(5):CD002850. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD002850.pub4
• Lindson N, Theodoulou A, Ordóñez-Mena JM, et al. Pharmacological and electronic cigarette interventions for smoking cessation in adults: component network meta-analyses. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2023;9(9):CD015226. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD015226.pub2
• Australian Government Department of Health. Fees, patient contributions and safety net thresholds [Internet]. Canberra: Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme; [cited 2026 Sep 24]. pbs.gov.au
• Better Health Channel (Victorian Government). Hypnosis [Internet]. Melbourne: Victorian Government; [cited 2026 Sep 24]. betterhealth.vic.gov.au
• TGA, nicotine vaping product access from 1 October 2024.

Where I could not verify something — the “fifteen times” claim, the cytisine brand name — I have said so rather than filled the gap.

Related

• Does hypnosis work?The hub: what 106 trials found, and where the recording loses to a therapist.
• The quit smoking sessionsWhat is in the catalogue, at US$175.00, with everything above still true.
• Hypnosis for alcoholWhat a recording can and can’t do for cutting back, and the free line to ring first.
• Hypnosis for gamblingWhat a recording offers, what the research found, and the free 24/7 helpline.
• VapingPharmacy-only since October 2024, and why “TGA approved” is the wrong phrase.

If you close this page having rung 13 7848 and bought nothing, this page did its job.

These are self-help audio sessions, not medical treatment, a diagnosis, or a substitute for professional care. No therapeutic outcome is claimed for any session sold on this site. Hypnosis is not a treatment for tobacco dependence: the 2019 Cochrane review found insufficient evidence to support its use for smoking cessation, and the RACGP lists it under ineffective approaches. Quitline is free on 13 7848. Smoking cessation medicines should be discussed with a GP or pharmacist. Better Health Channel advises avoiding hypnosis with severe depression, psychosis, or a drug or alcohol problem. Never listen while driving or operating machinery, and do not stop prescribed medication without your doctor’s approval.

Written by Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist, Adelaide, seeing clients Australia-wide by video. Last updated 2026-09-24.