Spiegel’s method for stopping smoking

Herbert Spiegel was an American physician in North Africa with the US Army during the Second World War. He had learnt to use hypnosis clinically before the war. As an army doctor he had to deal with hundreds of soldiers who were physically injured, but also hundreds more who had what is now called PTSD. As always in any wartime situation he was short of morphine and other drugs. So he turned to hypnosis. He discovered that he was able to greatly reduce the amount of morphine by using hypnosis instead. He was also successful in using hypnosis to reduce battlefield induced psychological injuries.

Spiegel's method

When he returned to civilian life he began to apply hypnosis in his normal medical practice. He published extensively and his ideas on hypnotherapy were widely taken up in the medical profession. Spiegel  moved hypnosis out of the area of stage hypnosis and into the area of proper academic study. He applied his hypnosis treatments to weight loss, depression, and in particular smoking.
He was able to claim consistent success with a single session hypnosis technique known as Spiegel's method. Spiegel's method encourages smokers to keep reminding themselves of three basic ideas. A) smoking is poisoning your body. B) if you keep poisoning your body you will die. C) if you don't want to die, then you have to respect and protect your body.

The method consists of teaching smokers self-hypnosis. The self-hypnosis installs a post hypnotic suggestion to encourage the smoker to repeat A, B, C every two hours, and any time they feel the craving to smoke.
The theory behind this method is that motivation is the key factor in stopping smoking. Spiegel believed that concentrating on preserving your own body is the key to changing any destructive behavior.

Testing Spiegel's method

Academics tested and repeated his technique several times, under scientific controlled conditions, and got consistently good results. About 25% of random smokers will be smoke free a year later.
However, a great deal of research and development has happened in the 40 years since Spiegel introduced his method, and modern hypnotists claim a much higher rate of success.
It would be interesting to go back to the motivation method, and see how today's  smokers accept the idea, and whether it works any better now than it did then.

Source: Spiegel, H. (1970). A single treatment method to stop smoking using ancillary self-hypnosis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 26, 22-29.