Pseudo-asthma Revisited: In Reply

Abstract

I thank Dr Anbar for his comments and agree completely with his concept of providing the child with habit cough the means to control the cough on his or her own. In describing our technique for suggestion therapy, we neglected to mention that we teach the patient how to use autosuggestion at home if the urge to cough returns. Once we stop the cough with the initial 15 minutes of suggestion therapy, we emphasize to the patient and family that we did not stop the cough, the patient did; we just showed the patient how to stop it. We advise the patient that if the urge to cough returns, he or she should isolate themselves with a timer, use sipping lukewarm water as an alternative behavior to coughing, and focus exclusively, with no distractions, on suppressing the urge to cough for 15 minutes. We did mention this in our original publication on the subject and described a patient who was successful in using our self-control technique after a return of symptoms.1 Is this the same as self-hypnosis? Because I have not yet taken Dr Anbar's pediatric hypnosis course (but look forward to the opportunity), I cannot say, but the technique seems to have self-hypnotic elements.