By Jessica Fargen
Boston Herald

Hollywood hot shots Matt Damon and Samuel L. Jackson kicked the habit with hypnosis and now a study at a North Shore hospital shows that the alternative therapy helps make quitters out of smokers better than the patch or nicotine gum.

"It looks very promising for hypnotherapy," said Dr. Faysal Hasan, chairman of the smoking cessation service at North Shore Medical Center in Salem and the leader of a small study on stop-smoking hyponosis.

Seven of 14 smokers using hypnotherapy weren’t smoking after six months, compared with three of 19 smokers who used nicotine replacement, according to the study of 67 patients, to be presented this week at a meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.

Karen Pischke, the registered nurse who hypnotized patients for the study, hoped the results would satisfy skeptics.

"There’s a lot of myths and misconceptions about hypnosis, based on stage acts and TV and movies," Pischke said. "(Patients) were a little afraid of it because they had this fear they might lose control."

Pischke uses her voice to bring patients into a hypnotic state, where she helps them stop thinking of themselves as smokers. During hypnosis patients enter a state of "focused concentration" where suggestions are believed to be more readily accepted.

"Part of it is changing their perception of themselves from a smoker to a nonsmoker," she said.

Hasan and his colleagues compared the quit rates of 67 smoking patients hospitalized with heart and lung problems. Each patient was given four options: hypnotherapy, nicotine replacement, a combination of nicotine replacement and hypnotherapy and cold turkey.

Patients who tried hypnotherapy went through a free session within seven days of leaving the hospital, plus six follow-up phone calls. Pischke also taught patients how to do self-hypnosis and gave them tapes to play after each session.