
Basically there were two types of hypnotism practiced to begin with. There was the hypnotism used for entertainment purposes, called “stage hypnosis”, and there was the hypnotism used to help people to achieve their personal goals.
Because the general public in those days didn't understand how hypnosis worked, hypnosis, when used in the world of entertainment, tended to scare people. We have a natural fear of the unknown which we at last seem to be outgrowing as a species. For this reason, those people that practiced hypnotism to help others wanted to distance their art from that of stage hypnosis, even though some of the best hypnotists started out entertaining the public with hypnosis. They came up with the term “clinical hypnosis”.
Once clinical hypnosis had been differentiated from stage hypnosis, people started to specialise in the therapeutic branch of hypnotism. The word “therapy” literally means "curing” or “healing”. The objective of therapy is to correct health problems and so the word “hypnotherapy” was born to promote the use of hypnosis to help people to correct their heath problems.
Many people today would be surprised at the number of health problems hypnotherapy is able to help with. Hospitals in the UK are starting to employ hypnotherapists to help their patients that suffer with IBS and to help with painless childbirth. A number of years ago the Queen of Belgium had thyroid surgery and opted for “hypnosedation” instead of chemical anaesthesia. Hypnotherapy is also used to control pain as demonstrated in class below by one of the true masters of hypnotherapy, Gerald F Kein.