By the time Andrew meets many clients, they are tired. They’ve tried all the ‘free’ therapies and have worked with their diabetes nurse and GP. Andrew joins the mind and body when doing his work. ‘I’m a hypnotherapist, a life coach, Neuro Linguistic Programming, I do the tapping, and I also do tai chi. It’s a whole mind and body thing, with hypnotherapy for mindset and tai chi for movement. We put the two together.’
shift an array of health issues, including mental health, physical ailments, phobias, and more. He finds when maximising what the mind and body can do folks can sometimes then lessen the amount of medications that they need. In time, this can lead to minimising the amount of surgery someone needs because, once a body is treated better, it can have a lesser need for medications. Andrew often meets people who have type 2 diabetes or have just received a diagnosis of prediabetes, and this health scare prompts them into wanting to make lifestyle changes. Generally, they have already put effort into making changes, but for whatever reason they’re unable to make these changes stick, and this is where Andrew comes in. ‘My bit is to give them suggestions that will help them stick to what’s been recommended. So we use hypnosis to increase the focus.’ He helps people embrace and stick to the diets recommended by their doctors, dietitian, or diabetes nurse. He helps them to change their lifestyle habits, to want to exercise more, and to change their attitude and mindset so they can focus on what they can do, rather than what they think they cannot achieve. ‘I’m often working with people with a very negative mindset. And attitude is the most disabling thing in the world.’
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DIABETES WELLNESS | Autumn 2025
FEAR FACTOR
In giving an example of how hypnosis can work, Andrew holds up a chocolate bar. ‘If this was my temptation and it’s in front of me, I might take it. But with hypnosis, I might not.’ Andrew says he treats temptation very differently to how a dietitian would. A dietitian or diabetes nurse would likely advise a patient to remove temptation from the house. ‘That’s not always possible,’ says Andrew, ‘especially if you have children and others sharing the house. Also, this common advice also tells you nothing about an individual’s ability to change.’ A hypnotherapist’s approach is to create a suggestion so strong that, even if someone is seeing a chocolate bar every day, their treatment (and practice at home) has given them the skills where they simply choose not to take it. The skills they have learnt gives the individual the power, rather than the chocolate bar. Another aspect where Andrew has helped people with prediabetes and others is for those with a needle phobia. He explains how he had a client whose doctor had told them that, if they didn’t change their eating habits and get it under control within the next three months, then they would have to be put on insulin.
Motivation can be seen as a positive or a negative. Some want to work towards something, while others seek to escape from something. Andrew’s client clearly wanted to get away from the possibility of having to inject insulin as they had a needle phobia. He explains, ‘So, instead of preparing them for the inevitability of having insulin, we built on that and said, let’s use this and build impetus, and this led to behaviour change. The fear of needles was one aspect, but they really wanted to be able to change the habits that they’d got stuck with over time.’ Fear was the negative push that had caused the client to reach out for help. Using the power of suggestion, the client and Andrew hit one food habit after another then got started on overhauling their existing exercise habits. After (time frame?) months/ appointments – and, importantly, time invested in practicing their newly learned techniques at home – their blood tests showed they were getting better control. ‘After about three months, their doctor told them their blood sugar was so under control that they’d gone back to a prediabetes state.’
