There's a school of therapy/psychology that has a rigourous epistemological basis and gets repeatable results. (I.e. an algorithm for eliminating phobias that works quickly and reliably with durable change.) This school gets panned for not being scientific, and I have to admit that that's not undeserved, however, as I said, the underlying conceptual structure is solid and the results are repeatable. I myself was cured of a deep and lifelong depression in a single session of hypnosis by one of the co-founders of this school. So not only can I vouch for its conceptual integrity, I can also vouch for its dramatic efficacy. (This isn't "my cousin", or "some guy I heard about", it was me. I lived the anecdote.)
FWIW, some books. "Structure of Magic" I & II are the first two books and are a good place to start from to see the origins of the latter work. TRANCE-Formations is a rich text on theraputic hypnosis. And then there's the Core Transformation Process, an algorithm for profound spiritual growth.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/964154.The_Structure_of_...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821993.The_Structure_of_...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/956297.Trance_Formations
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369813.Core_Transformati...
You call it rigorous, with a solid underlying conceptual structure, and repeatable results. Is there a gap between that and "being scientific" ? I have no particular feeling about hypnosis and no experience with it, but am a bit curious about why you would say that calling the practice not scientific is not undeserved. What are the missing bits to allow it to be either considered scientifically sound (or on the other end of the spectrum, to debunk it) ?
That's a fascinating and (IMO) extremely important question.
Hypnosis in general and Neurolinguistic Programming specifically are regularly panned by skeptics, and have not been scientifically well-documented, yet there is definitely "something there".
I'd love to "do science" to NLP, but I'm not qualified and have other things to do. (I got rid of my depression and the urge to study psychology waned.)
> am a bit curious about why you would say that calling the practice not scientific is not undeserved.
It's just that a lot of practitioners and promoters haven't been completely scrupulous IMO about making NLP out to be more scientifically-grounded than it is.