For most people who don't want to show off there little reason to use hypnosis without also using other anesthetica at the same time. Especially if you have to get past an ethic board. I wouldn't expect many scientific papers to exist that investigate the issue.
On the flipside, those who ask to use self hypnosis in lieu of anesthesia will tend to be those who want to show off. A news article like the one in the Daily Mail (which has a well established history of not investigating its reports thoroughly, particularly in the areas of health and science, to ensure that they're actually true) is tremendously good business for a hypnotherapist. If the reality were that it hurt like a motherfucker, but he was able to tough it out, if he could arrange to get an article like the above into print it would still be much to his benefit.
I wouldn't be surprised if hypnotic techniques can mitigate pain; it's a mental coping mechanism. You can also get quite good at dealing with physical pain simply by practice. It may be possible for a person to block out the experience of pain entirely through the use of mental techniques, some mental techniques do have very significant effect, but the degree of evidence I've found available isn't enough to disabuse my skepticism. If I were a hypnotherapist who wanted to convince people that my abilities were much more profound than they really were, I would start looking for ways I could trick people into giving a favorable report. If I were a hypnotherapist who really did have abilities which were that profound, I would want to prove it in as high profile and fireproof a manner as I could manage.
I don't want to argue that making up plausible lies is the only feature of those courses but as far as I understand it's a crucial part of them. The soldier is trained to reach a state where he can tell those lies. He's not trained to simply shut off.
I'm not sure that the kind of pain reduction that I think is possible through hypnosis would be of high use for training soldiers to resist torture in a cost effective way.
Training in self hypnotic techniques was one of the initiatives that came out of the New Earth Battalion; many of the techniques investigated (such as the ability to kill animals by staring at them for extended periods) were not realistically practical for military applications even if they had turned out to work. But it does not seem that soldiers capable of entirely blocking out pain ever materialized.
It may be possible for a person to block out the experience of pain entirely through the use of mental techniques, some mental techniques do have very significant effect, but the degree of evidence I've found available isn't enough to disabuse my skepticism.
It's difficult to know what another person really feels when you don't trust them to tell you. I know quite a few people who allowed needles to get sticked into their hands and didn't feel any pain because of hypnosis.
...If I were a hypnotherapist who really did have abilities which were that profound
I started going out with a fantastic girl a couple of weeks ago. Everything is great, except that whenever I've sent her a text message or email requesting something and haven't received a response yet, I experience significant dysphoric anxiety, fearing that her response will be not just "no" but "no and I don't want to date you any more". This is due to brain chemistry or personal history, take your pick—either seems like a possible explanation to me. But there's certainly no evidence supporting the idea that this is likely to happen, nor is the anxiety helping me prevent it or helping me in any other way.
Does anyone have evidence-based advice, or pointers to same, on dealing with this kind of issue? It is the only splotch on what have otherwise been the best two weeks of my life.