From The Rainbow Machine: Tales from a Neurolinguist’s Journal by Andrew T. Austin.
A person improves after an intervention. The sequence is real. The explanation may be much less certain. It is tempting for a practitioner to take credit, especially when the improvement is dramatic and the intervention is something they strongly believe in.
“Patching Holes” in The Rainbow Machine is uncomfortable for me for precisely that reason. I described an impressive recovery and was ready to regard it as something I had produced. Looking back, the distinction between an event following my intervention and an event being caused by it deserves much more attention.
The case that encouraged an easy explanation
I was working on a neurosurgical unit. A man had a condition that was not responding to what was being done for it. The difficulty had arisen as a complication of other treatment and threatened to have a considerable effect on his quality of life. He was understandably angry about the situation.
In a conversational intervention drawing on NLP and hypnotherapy, I helped him change the picture he held in his mind of his condition. He subsequently recovered. At the time, I took credit for what appeared to be a remarkable result.
The change in his imagery and his later recovery do not establish that the first caused the second. Other treatment, the natural course of the condition, timing and factors I did not recognise may have contributed. My involvement was one event within a clinical situation, not a controlled comparison that separated its effect from everything else.
It is possible to describe the conversation accurately without turning it into evidence of a physical cure. It is also possible to acknowledge that a story I once found persuasive no longer supports the confidence I placed in it. That revision is part of taking the work seriously.
How a claim travels farther than its evidence
Practitioner communities are full of memorable accounts: hypnosis eliminating pain, an intervention changing bodily function, or a particular method resolving a condition that other people had failed to treat. I heard these stories in practice groups and training settings. When I was younger, I repeated some of them myself.
A story can acquire authority through repetition. Each teller may sincerely assume that someone earlier in the chain checked it. Eventually, the number of people who have heard the story is mistaken for the number of independent observations supporting it.
Online publishing makes it easier to reach a large audience with such claims. That increases the need for a clear account of the evidence. An impressive testimonial, a practitioner’s reputation and the ability to tell a convincing story remain different things from a demonstrated treatment effect.
What would a useful demonstration establish?
When someone claims repeatedly to cure serious physical conditions, it is reasonable to ask them to show what they are doing and how the outcome was established. The relevant information includes the original diagnosis, the treatment already being received, the timing of the change, independent assessment and follow-up.
A filmed demonstration can make some aspects of a procedure visible. It does not automatically establish a diagnosis, causation or a durable result. A person’s appearance on camera may be informative about one moment while telling us little about the medical condition being claimed as cured.
Medical information also belongs to the patient. Any independent review or public account needs appropriate consent and privacy protection. “Show the evidence” is a demand for credible verification, not an entitlement to publish someone’s records or expose their identity.
The head-injury recovery behind a magazine story
A separate case from a neuroscience service made the problem especially vivid. A young woman arrived after a severe head injury and was initially not expected to survive. Paramedics, emergency staff and surgical teams worked to save her. She went through emergency surgery, intensive care and further operations over an extended period.
Many people contributed. Nurses, doctors, technicians and other specialists were involved, with repeated assessments and discussion of her care. As signs of recovery appeared, she moved through high-dependency care and rehabilitation. Physiotherapists and other staff helped her regain function.
Eventually she came to the lower-dependency unit where I worked. I was one person among the team caring for her, and she remained with us for some months before discharge to community rehabilitation. By the time I knew her, an enormous amount of work had already gone into keeping her alive and supporting recovery.
The treatment that vanished from the account
A Reiki practitioner was allowed to visit during that later stage. The unit was open to some complementary practitioners, subject to approval and the requirement that they did not interfere with medical treatment. It was a controlled environment because patients were vulnerable; it was not a ward that anyone could simply walk into.
Months later, during a night shift, I picked up a magazine brought in by a colleague. A feature described a woman whose doctors had supposedly given up and whose life had been saved by Reiki. I recognised her photograph. She was the woman our teams had spent so long treating.
I was astonished by the attribution. The account I read gave the healing practice the central credit while the extensive medical effort was effectively replaced by a story of abandonment. I showed it to colleagues because the difference between the published narrative and the care we knew was so striking.
This is my recollection of encountering that feature. I do not know who shaped every part of its wording or how the woman understood all the events around her. The important issue is the missing treatment history. A recovery story can be emotionally compelling and still give a misleading account of what happened.
Ask what else happened
Over the years, I have met people who attributed recovery from serious illness to NLP or another named talking or alternative therapy. In some conversations, asking whether they had also received chemotherapy, radiotherapy or surgery produced an immediate yes. That information had not been prominent in the first version of the story.
When several things happen during a recovery, credit cannot be assigned solely by asking which experience felt most personally significant. A warm relationship or memorable session may be especially meaningful to the patient. Its emotional significance does not establish which intervention affected the disease.
Cancer Research UK distinguishes complementary approaches used alongside care from alternatives used in place of it, and states that alternative therapies have not been scientifically shown to control or cure cancer. That distinction should remain clear in how practitioners describe their work.
Support does not require a claim of cure
Helping someone with fear, a traumatic experience or a difficult conversation can matter greatly. Those are substantial aims in their own right. They do not need to be promoted as cures for a physical illness in order to deserve attention.
Equally, a person’s illness is not evidence that their mindset is defective. I have known upbeat people who became seriously ill and difficult, pessimistic people who lived into old age. Personal anecdotes cannot settle a research question about health, but they should make us cautious about a simplistic moral story in which positivity earns recovery and negativity causes disease.
A person can benefit emotionally from support and still remain ill. A treatment can be unsuccessful without the patient having failed to believe in it enough. Those possibilities must remain available if a therapeutic relationship is to be honest.
The commercial question behind certainty
A practitioner who criticises medical services for financial motives should be prepared for equivalent questions about their own business. What is being sold? What outcome is promised? What evidence supports that outcome? What happens when it does not occur?
Charging for skilled work is not, by itself, a problem. The concern is selling certainty to people whose illness makes them understandably eager for help. A high course fee, an impressive stage presentation or a claim to work with a particular patient group does not answer whether the advertised result has been demonstrated.
For my own case story, the accurate statement is modest: I conducted an intervention, and the man later recovered. Establishing whether the intervention produced that recovery would require evidence the anecdote does not provide.
More from The Rainbow Machine
Explore the Rainbow Machine article index for related discussions of therapeutic outcomes, medical claims and the difference between a memorable story and a supported explanation.