Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Does it do anything?

[reddragdiva]

... No.

The theory doesn't hold, so if you want to build further theory on it you're out of luck. (Wikipedia summarises the problems pretty well: the models are provably incorrect, it appears oddly hard to teach and communicate, and advocates even try claiming science is inadequate to analysing it.)

The master hack for getting people to do what you want is confidence: simply, to confidently tell them to do what you want. NLP works insofar as having a theory at all, even an erroneous one, increases your confidence. And what NLP actually sells is getting people to do what you want. So NLP delivers what it's selling. Sort of.

(I said "simple," not "easy." But that is the actual answer.)

Many other such marketed mental hacks work the same way, including ones that sell themselves as therapies rather than control techniques. They pretty much all work by applied confidence. Some with an admixture of exploiting cognitive biases.

If you don't buy that and think I'm just mired in pseudosceptic negativity, you could always try using NLP for weight loss, psoriasis or to cure cancer.

Comments

[quiet000001]

Well, damn, here I had a liver biopsy and all I needed was the right person to talk to me?

(Shall we ignore the fact that there's a known link between psoriasis and stress, so it's entirely possible that basically reducing someone's stress about the disease by way of convincing them that it was 'cured' might result in an improvement in the severity? Or how about the fact that it's not a fixed-state condition to start with? My skin has changed dramatically in the past over the course of a couple of days due to stress, illness, and several times who-the-hell-knows-what. In fact, my skin getting worse relatively suddenly is one of the indicators I use to determine if I should probably see a doctor about being sick.)

[reddragdiva]

There's a vast gulf between "a reduction in stress helped me personally with problem X" (which happens to a lot of people with a lot of problems) and "NLP is a reliable treatment to advocate to people in general for this physical problem." Given NLP's model doesn't work, the latter is medical charlatanry even if the charlatan is sincere.

[quiet000001]

Oh, yes, I was referring to the NLP people pretending like they have some magic cure when really, if stress is contributing significantly to the severity of the condition, then ANY stress reduction method that works for the individual is likely to produce similar results. (Which I, personally, would also not consider a 'cure' since stress is only one component of all of the crazy wacky things going on when you have an autoimmune condition.)

I've run into people convinced that meditation 'cured' their psoriasis and I'm willing to guess that it's the exact same mechanism - they're doing something they believe will help and that will reduce stress, and so their stress levels drop, and you get a drop in inflammation levels in the body as a result and Magically the symptoms improve.

(Plus, often stuff like getting into meditation is linked to lifestyle changes like switching detergents and body products, and residue in clothing and sheets or detergents or perfumes in body products can definitely be topical irritants that contribute to the severity, and some dietary changes help some people... There's a whole load of stuff going on that's likely contributing to any improvement.)

(To say nothing of the fact that psoriasis as a condition can effectively go into remission spontaneously from time to time, or with significant changes like getting pregnant - it's not at all uncommon for women who get pregnant who have psoriasis to see changes in the severity, or for women who haven't had it before to have it turn up during the pregnancy and go away after, never to be seen again.)

TL;DR version: Psoriasis is WAY too complicated in terms of what MIGHT be influencing the severity for anyone to convince me that something will result in a significant improvement without a properly conducted and repeated medical trial. (And even then, chances are it will only work for a certain percentage of the population who have psoriasis, since that seems to be what they're finding with drug treatments.)

Also, people who come up to me and tell me that I'd be magically cured if I only did X make me grumpy. :) So no support for NLP people from this corner.

(Personally, I'm not going to consider anything an actual CURE for psoriasis unless they manage to actually fix the defect that makes the immune system misbehave in the first place. Anything else, even the targeted drugs on the market now, is just a treatment. Thankfully, some of them are exceptionally effective treatments, but at the end of the day, if you go off treatment, chances are sooner or later the symptoms will turn up again because the problem is still there.)

(And I think people who sell 'miracle cures' to people with severe psoriasis and draw them away from effective medical treatment should be ashamed of themselves - there's more and more evidence coming out that having chronic inflammatory conditions like psoriasis significantly increase your risks for cardiac problems and things like diabetes, so while I don't agree with forcing someone to undergo some of the treatments available if they don't want to, I feel VERY strongly that they should be properly informed of the long term implications of having this type of autoimmune condition so they in turn can make sure future doctors are informed, make educated decisions about treatment risks, etc.)

[reddragdiva]

It's similar to the ethics of using homeopathy on someone. Is it ethical to lie to your patient in the hope of invoking the placebo effect? Is it ethical to pay someone who doesn't think they're lying to lie to your patient?

[quiet000001]

are you telling me homeopathy doesn't work? It doesn't really change the vibrations of the water molecules? *gasp*

(Or whatever the hell it is they claim anyway. I don't even understand how they think it works.)

(Slightly unrelated, but one of my favorite things to come up when you start getting alternative/herbal medication types going on about how drugs are evil and natural is better is when one of the natural is better types starts recommending things like willow bark tea. Because when it comes from a tree in a uncertain strength, it's fine, but when it comes from a production line with a lab with quality control checks to make sure each tablet has X amount, and goes into a bottle marked "aspirin" it's suddenly EVIL. Wtf?)

[mouseworks]

I have a friend here who is seriously in to herbal medicines. Here is Nicaragua where some of the herbs are quite powerful (often rather poisonous), so the placebo effect is something like "all the toxins leave your system and get purged, so you will feel some pain but that's the medicine working." What I've heard from her is "when bacteria become resistant to modern drugs, we'll have to go back to herbal medicine." Yes, and we'll die of infections just like we did before antibiotics.