What are the common symptoms that your patients tend to present with?

The condition that I see more than anything is anxiety. Mostly, it's generalised anxiety or health anxiety. I also see a lot of social anxiety and performance anxiety.

I see a lot of people for sleep problems and irritable bowel syndrome who do really well with hypnosis. Many other medical conditions respond well to hypnotherapy such as menopausal symptoms, tinnitus, pain, teeth grinding, globus and migraine.

I see a lot of people with fears and phobias and the most common presenting ones are fear of flying, needle and dental phobia.

I also see people who want to stop smoking, lose weight and those who want to cut down their drinking. I see quite a lot of people for depression, as well as issues with low confidence and low self-esteem.

Often, people come with habits they want to break, such as nail-biting, hair pulling, thumb sucking.

What are the treatments that you're able to offer your patients?

I'm really happy to talk with patients beforehand if they want to find out whether hypnotherapy will be suitable for them or not. My appointments are an hour long. I explain to patients about hypnosis, what it entails and how it works.

We talk about the issue that they've come with, and how it is affecting their life and find out what the goals for treatment are. Then we do the actual hypnosis part. It mostly tends to last about 20 minutes, although it can vary. I record that session and email it to patients so they can listen to it at home and they find that really useful.

It's personalised and tailor-made for them. I advise they listen to it again when they have quiet time during the day or before they go to bed at night. Some people like to listen to it when they're on the train. Listening to it again helps reinforce and embed the suggestions into the unconscious mind, so day by day people find they notice positive changes in how they're thinking, feeling and behaving.

It varies from patient to patient how many times I see someone. About 50% of people, I only see once. Once they have the recording, they find that that's enough to get them on the road that they wanted to be on. Otherwise, I see patients for two to three sessions. I rarely tend to see someone for more than three sessions.

What are your areas of sub-specialist interest?

I also treat children from the age of seven upwards. I see a lot of children and teenagers. There are a lot of hypnotherapists who won't treat children. Having done a paediatric job in my general practice training and 20 years as a GP, I feel really comfortable treating children. They respond really well to hypnosis and often only need one session.

With the younger children, it's often about confidence, anxiety, sleep problems, worries about food, missing parents, among others.

I see lots of teenagers with anxiety, panic, depression, exam stress and social anxiety. I also see a lot of teenagers with a fear of vomiting. They usually have anxiety causing physical symptoms such as a feeling in the pit of their stomach that they interpret that as feeling sick which makes them more anxious. They respond well to hypnotherapy.

At least, 40% of my workload is seeing the under 18 years of age demographic.