What are the biggest risks or harms reported with hypnosis in patients?

The short version: the retrieved records report no serious harms from hypnosis at all, and that silence is the finding, not proof of safety.

Across every record here, the only adverse effect tied to any of these conservative therapies was discomfort from wearing a limb liner, and 6 of 52 people dropped out over it [1]. That was the liner, not the hypnosis. The hypnosis trials themselves report no harms: the burn RCT in children tracked pain, anxiety, and heart rate but lists no adverse events [2], and the pediatric respiratory review, built mostly on case series, reports no worsening of symptoms [3].

That is thin. These are small studies with short follow-up, and most trials simply do not report adverse events, which the phantom-limb review itself admits [1]. A trial that never asks about harm will never find it. The documented risks of hypnosis in the wider literature, outside this retrieval, are things like false memories, distress during trance, and symptom substitution, but I cannot put a rate on any of them and none of these records measured them.

My call: for a patient considering hypnosis, the honest answer is that the recorded harms are minor and rare, but the safety data is close to absent because nobody designed these trials to look. Confidence: low.