Hypnotherapy, Acupuncture and Laser Therapy: What the Evidence Says

Search for help with quitting and you will quickly meet a clinic offering hypnotherapy with a ninety per cent success rate, or a laser therapy session promising to end your cravings in an afternoon. The numbers are striking. They are also, almost without exception, not derived from anything resembling a controlled trial.

The honest summary of the evidence is less exciting than either the marketing or the dismissal, so it is worth going through them one at a time.

Hypnotherapy has been studied reasonably often, and the reviews reach a consistent and slightly unsatisfying conclusion: there is not good enough evidence to say it works better than other approaches, and the studies that exist are mostly small, varied in method, and of low quality. That is not the same as evidence that it does nothing. It means the question has not been answered well. Some people do stop after hypnotherapy. Whether they stopped because of the hypnosis, or because they paid a meaningful amount of money and committed to a session on a chosen date with a person expecting them to succeed, is precisely what the trials have been unable to separate.

Acupuncture has been studied more, including in Cochrane reviews, and the picture there is clearer and less favourable. When acupuncture is compared against sham acupuncture — needles placed in the wrong points, or retractable needles that do not penetrate — the difference largely disappears. There may be a short-term effect immediately after treatment, but it does not hold up at six months, which is the horizon that matters. Auricular acupuncture, the ear-point version specifically marketed for smoking, has not performed better.

Laser therapy, often sold as a form of low-level laser acupuncture, has the weakest evidence base of the three. There is very little independent research, and what exists does not support the success rates advertised. The claim that a laser session resets the brain's nicotine receptors or releases endorphins that eliminate withdrawal does not have a credible mechanism behind it.

Electronic gadgets and apps are a broader category and a more mixed one. Text-message and app-based support programmes have actually accumulated reasonable evidence, and some do help — but the ones that work tend to be structured behavioural programmes rather than trackers, and the effect is modest rather than transformative.

Now the part that usually gets lost. The fact that a method has weak evidence does not mean everyone who used it and stopped was imagining things. Two real things are going on.

The first is that any of these creates a commitment moment. You choose a date, you pay, you turn up, you tell people. Those are genuinely useful components of quitting and they exist independently of whether the needle or the laser did anything.

The second is that the alternative is rarely nothing. People who book a session usually also stop buying cigarettes, clear the house, and mobilise support. The session gets the credit for a change that had several contributors.

Which suggests a reasonable way to think about it. If you want to try hypnotherapy and you can afford it, there is no strong reason not to, provided you understand you are paying for structure and commitment rather than a proven mechanism, and provided it is not replacing something that does work. The things with solid evidence behind them are unglamorous and mostly free or cheap: nicotine replacement, particularly combining a patch with a faster-acting form; prescription medication such as varenicline; and behavioural support from a stop-smoking service. Combining medication with behavioural support roughly triples the chances compared with willpower alone, and that figure comes from a large body of trials rather than a clinic's own website.

Be sceptical of any specific high success rate that is not attached to a published study, and be especially sceptical of a guarantee. And if you have already tried one of these and gone back to smoking, the useful conclusion is not that you are unusually resistant to quitting. It is that you were sold a mechanism that probably was not there.