The Spanish Agency for Medicine and Medicine Products issued a report on Homeopathy and Homeopathic Products which said homeopathy was ineffective

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Homeopathy has been touted for treating fear of public speaking or stage fright. On April 13, 2024 I blogged about An extremely peculiar homeopathic remedy for stage fright.

 

There is an article by Edzard Ernst on April 22, 2026 titled “Homeopathy and Homeopathic Products: Evaluation of Evidence on Their Efficacy and Safety” by the Spanish Agency for Medicine and Medicine Products. He described the Spanish language content of that report as follows:

 

“The Spanish Agency for Medicines and Medical Products (AEMPS) has just published a comprehensive technical report entitled “Homeopathy and Homeopathic Products: Evaluation of Evidence on Their Efficacy and Safety,” which categorically concludes that there is no scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of homeopathy as a therapeutic tool. After a systematic review of scientific literature and evaluations by state agencies internationally, the report states that the observed effects are comparable to placebo.

The report, which analyzed 64 systematic reviews published since 2009, highlights that most studies suggesting benefits from homeopathy have low methodological quality, often invalidated by small samples, short follow-up periods, or biases in randomization. Furthermore, it notes that as the quality and rigor of clinical trials increase, the supposed effect of homeopathy diminishes until it disappears entirely.”

That conclusion of ineffectiveness is not new. On January 6, 2016 I blogged about how According to Consumer Reports, homeopathy is an emperor with no clothes.

The sugar pills were cropped and flipped from this image at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

A magazine article with 18 practical strategies for accepting and managing stage fright among musicians

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting and useful article by Eva Bojner Horwitz and Paulina Valtasaari at Frontiers in Psychology on June 24, 2025 titled Acceptance and management of stage fright among musicians: a manual of practical strategies. Most of their 18 strategies also apply to speech fright (fear of public speaking). The article has a series of eighteen useful stick figures that are shown in Figure 1. And Table 1 presents themes for them describing how you should feel and act, and the result. (The seven-page .pdf file has a much clearer version of Table 1 than the text does).

 

Table 2 presents their 18 strategies grouped into five categories related to stage fright. For brevity, I have just listed each theme and how to feel. They are as follows:

 

Awareness and Attention

Conscious Awareness: Locate emotions in your body and observe thoughts.

Listen! Hear and feel the sound resonate in your body.

Feel Your Body: Scan body sensations neutrally.

Breath: Sense breathing patterns and muscle tension.

Concentration: Notice sensations and interactions with your instrument.

Focus on Your Mind: Observe thoughts and their effects on the body.

 

Stress and Relaxation

Unwind: Recognize arousal and post-stress recovery needs.

Relax: Recognize when relaxation is possible or obstructed.

Heat Control: Adapt to warmth or cols.

When Alarm Goes Off: Recognize early signs of stress.

 

Self-Reflection

Self-Reflection: Process successes and failures constructively.

Suggestion: Notice self-critical thoughts’ physical effects.

 

Visualisation and Goal Setting

Set a Goal: Balance excitement and self-efficacy.

Visualize: Imagine playing vividly, noting sensations and movements.

Inner Vision: Focus on specific parts or tasks in your body.

 

Recalling Positive Experiences

Memorize Good Memories: Relive successes and supportive interactions.

Happy and Pleased: Sense happiness in your body.

Satisfied: Identify physical sensations of satisfaction.

 

The pianist image was cropped from one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Free 2023 e-book on Public Speaking as Performance

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a free 148-page e-book from 2023 by Mechele Leon, Renee Cyr, and Jonah Greene titled Public Speaking as Performance: Practicing public speaking in the theatre & performance. It has four parts and sixteen chapters:

 

Prologue: Part I

Thinking about Public Speaking - Chapter 1

Actor Tools for Public Speaking - Chapter 2

 

Context: Part II

Speaking Occasion - Chapter 3

Audience Analysis - Chapter 4

Ways of Delivering Speeches - Chapter 5

From Page to Stage - Chapter 6

 

Speechwriting: Part III

Writing for Listeners - Chapter 7

Purpose and Thesis - Chapter 8

Structure and Organization - Chapter 9

Introductions and Conclusions - Chapter 10

Ethics in Public Speaking - Chapter 11

Language in Speechwriting - Chapter 12

Presentation Aids - Chapter 13

 

Purposes: Part IV

Informative Speeches – Chapter 14

Persuasive Speeches - Chapter 15

Special Occasion Speeches - Chapter 16

 

The authors all are in the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of Kansas. Mechele Leon is a professor and the other two are graduate teaching assistants.

 

On December 22, 2020 I blogged about Be your very own Santa Claus by downloading free e-textbooks about public speaking and mentioned another 2019 e-book from the University of Kansas by Meggie Mapes titled Speak Out, Call In: Public speaking as Advocacy.

 

My cartoon of an actor was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

An extremely peculiar homeopathic remedy for stage fright

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I recently found an article by Vikas Sharma at DrHomeo titled Want to get rid of stage fright? Try these homeopathic remedies. He lists the following eight:

 

Argentum Nitricum – top recommended medicine

Gelsemium – for stage fright with fear of appearing in public

Lycopodium -for fear occurring on starting stage presentation but afterwards it goes well

Silicea – for stage fright with a fear of failure

Aconite – for stage fright with marked anxiety and panic attacks

Arsenic Album – for anxiety with marked restlessness

Medorrhinum – for stage fright, anxiety with anticipation

Ambra Grisea – for shy people having fear of people

 

I have previously blogged about five of them: Argentum Nitricum, Gelsemium, Lycopodium, Silicea, and Ambra Grisea.

 

But what the heck is Medorrhinum? I had not ever seen it before. There is another article by Vikas Sharma at DrHomeo titled Medorrhinum: Homeopathic Medicine – Its Use, Indications And Dosage. He says it is recommended in high potencies but gives no specific dosage, only that this medicine should not be repeated frequently. And Sharma claims:

 

“It is magnificent medicine to manage cases of fear, anxiety, and panic attacks. Main fears that are present in those who require it include fear of dark, enclosed spaces (claustrophobia), misfortune, cancer, and sexually transmitted diseases. Those who need it are anxious, sensitive, nervous by their very nature. They are always in great hurry.”  

 

But Sharma does not say how it is prepared. There is another recent article by Dr. Mahima Rastogi at LinkedIn Pulse on November 5, 2023 titled Unlocking the healing potential of homeopathic Medorrhinum. Mr. Rastogi explains that:

 

“Medorrhinum is a nosode, which is a type of homeopathic remedy prepared from the discharge, secretions, or diseased tissue of a person or animal suffering from a particular disease. In this case, Medorrhinum is derived from the discharge of a person with gonorrhea. It is important to note that nosodes are highly diluted and succussed (shaken vigorously) in a series of steps to create a potent yet safe homeopathic remedy.”

  

There also is yet another article by Edzard Ernst on May 8, 2018 titled Medorrhinum: another surprising homeopathic remedy. He says more specifically the remedy comes from the urethral discharge of a male patient suffering from gonorrhea, and adds that none of the claims about it are supported by evidence.

 

Still another article by Vikas Sharma at DrHomeo is titled Top 5 Natural Homeopathic Remedies for Anxiety. These and their recommended dosages [in brackets] are:

 

Aconitum Napellus – top remedy for anxiety [30C]

Arsenic Album – for anxiety with chest constriction, difficult breathing and restlessness [30C]

Argentum Nitricum – for anxiety from anticipation (anticipatory anxiety) [30C]

Kali Phos – for anxiety, nervousness, fear [6X aka 3C]

Gelsemium Sempervirens – for anxiety about public appearance (social anxiety) [30C]

 

Note that the Homeopathic dilution of 3C for Kali Phos is a gigantic factor of 27C different from the 30C for the other four. C means a dilution by a factor of a hundred. At dilutions of 13C and above no molecules of the original substance remain, so any effect at 30C is purely as a placebo.  

 

The Gonorrhea cartoon was modified from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Stage fright doesn’t impact 73% of the U.S. adult population, it’s really just 21%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes what we read from a usually reliable source is just plain wrong. There is an article by Mariana Bockarova at Psychology Today on March 16, 2023 titled Local Perspectives: Singing With Stage Fright. She opened it by claiming:

 

“According to the National Institute of Mental Health, ‘stage fright,’ or performance anxiety - the fear one feels when needing to perform or present in public, impacts approximately 73 percent of the population. In fact, stage fright is the most commonly cited fear people have.”

 

That’s hogwash. On August 12, 2015 I blogged about how There’s really no mystery about how common stage fright is. Research supported by the National Institute of Mental Health found 21.2 percent had stage fright – about three times less.

 

That 73 percent is a baseless number from a commercial web site called Statistic Brain – it is their claimed percent of men who suffer from speech anxiety. I showed their table in another blog post on August 14, 2020 titled Toastmaster magazine is spreading nonsense from John Bowe about how common the fear of public speaking is.

 

And the 2023 Chapman Survey of American Fears lists public speaking as the 53rd most common fear, at a similar 28.7%.

 

The image of Dmitry Bertman on stage was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Beta blockers are the last thing you should try to treat anxiety about public speaking

Sometimes I find an overenthusiastic, poorly researched, cheerleading article touting a product as the greatest thing since sliced bread. On June 5, 2019 there was such an article by Zara Stone at Ozy titled This startup wants to make you a better public speaker. It described Kick, which was peddling internet (telemedicine) prescriptions for a beta blocker pill, propranolol.

First, what is a beta blocker? A Mayo Clinic web page explains that:

“Beta blockers, also known as beta-adrenergic blocking agents, are medications that reduce your blood pressure. Beta blockers work by blocking the effects of the hormone epinephrine, also known as adrenaline. When you take beta blockers, your heart beats more slowly and with less force, thereby reducing blood pressure. Beta blockers also help blood vessels open up to improve blood flow.”

Another web page at Medline Plus discusses why propranolol is prescribed, precautions, and its side effects.

Zara Stone’s Ozy article claims that:

“Public speaking tops the most-feared list for many in America, affecting 26 percent, according to a 2018 Chapman University survey — that’s higher than the fear of flying, clowns and animals combined.”

But if you look at the Chapman article listing the fears for 2018 (for which no link was provided in her article) you will find Corrupt government officials are ranked as  #1 (73.6%) while Public speaking is way down at #60 (26.2%).

She also discussed the Musicians Health Survey that according to her found:

“66 percent of classical musicians said beta blockers improved their performance”

But the survey really said that 72 percent tried them, while 6% tried but found them not effective. Of those 66%, 37% tried and found them very effective, and 29% tried and found them just somewhat effective.

That survey also compared effectiveness for fifteen different treatments in a chart that followed immediately after the one with the 66 percent improvement statistic. I replotted it above. Note that while 92 percent found beta blockers effective - almost exactly as many, 91 percent, found that just experience (desensitization) was effective.  

Back on October 25, 2017 there was another far less rosy article about Kick by Rebecca Robbins at STAT titled Anxious about a big speech? This startup wants to calm you down – with a cardiac drug you pop like a mint. Her article notes that other drugs now are prescribed for social anxiety disorder, not just to block adrenaline. Rebecca quotes Boston University psychologist Stefan Hoffman as bemoaning:

“Bringing up propranolol is resurrecting a dead body.” and “That’s a horrible idea. It’s a horrible idea.”

An earlier article from 2011 at the Consumer Reports web site titled How to treat stage fright quoted Franklin Schneier, M.D.:

“Taken an hour before a performance, beta-blockers will reliably decrease symptoms like a pounding heart and a trembling voice or hands…But a moderate level of anxiety energizes a performance, so beta-blockers may actually reduce performance quality in people who are not very anxious. Also, people often become psychologically dependent on them and feel they need them and feel they need one before every performance, rather than learning skills to manage their anxiety.”

At Slate on June 25, 2019 there was still another article by Shannon Palus with the cautionary title Beta blockers were a miracle cure for my stage fright (then they took over my life).

Yet another article by Daniel McGinn on August 4, 2017 in The Atlantic titled Can this drug cure performance anxiety? included a story about his having told a friend about beta blockers. That friend wanted to borrow some of his, but Daniel instead supplied him with some vitamin B12 pills. His friend then raved that the pills were magic - although they really just were a placebo.

On April 16, 2018 at his Public Words blog Nick Morgan posted about What to do about public speaking fear when nothing else works, and mentioned beta blockers.

The image of sliced bread came from Timdogrulez at Wikimedia Commons.  

Explaining a cryptic quotation about stage fright

On December 19, 2018, at his Manner of Speaking blog, John Zimmer posted Quotes for Public Speakers (No. 299) – Adam Duritz. Adam is a songwriter and singer who you might know about as a founding member of the band Counting Crows. That cryptic quote was:

“People ask me if I have stage fright. I say, ‘God no, I’m completely comfortable there. I have rest-of-the-day fright.”

That quote came from an article in Origin magazine on September 9, 2014. The entire paragraph is clearer:

“People ask me if I have stage fright. I say, ‘God no, I’m completely comfortable there. I have rest-of-the-day fright.’ I mean, the nice thing about being on stage is it’s not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I’m up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine. But the rest of life, I have no sense of that. It’s one of the problems I’ve always had in my life: I have a lot of problems understanding connections between people and how to negotiate that. It makes everything hard offstage.”

The Wikipedia article about Adam has a dead link to an article he wrote for Men’s Health magazine. It is from April 16, 2008 and is titled The lonely disease. Adam has a dissociative disorder (depersonalization) and had learned how to cope with it. You can read more about depersonalization in The Merck Manual here.

My favorite Counting Crows song is 1996’s A Long December – a hopeful song with a piano lead and accordion backwash.   

The silhouette of a crow came from Openclipart.

A little fear of public speaking is good, but a lot is awful

Is public speaking fear good for you? Maybe yes, maybe no - as is shown above. It depends on the level of fear. An article by Dean Burnett in The Guardian on October 16, 2014 titled Social anxiety: why the mundane can be terrifying pointed out that:

“....Sometimes, stress and pressure can increase performance. 


This is actually a reliable occurrence, and gave rise to the Yerkes-Dodson law. This law can be represented by a simple curve, and basically shows that as nervousness and stress increase, performance increases. 

 
You’ve heard people say they work better when a deadline is imminent? This is probably true. And maybe the brain is piling the pressure on in social situations where you want to impress – to increase your performance, upping the odds of you doing so?
 
But this increase in performance only occurs up to a point. And that point is all important: too much stress or pressure and your performance declines to nothing. People can’t function properly when they’re incredibly stressed, and it shows.”

That curve also has been discussed in a 2011 article by Jennifer K. Paweleck-Bellingrodt on Anxiety, a 2012 article by Scott Duggan titled You Need Stress - Really! and a 2015 article by Till H. Gross titled 4 public speaking tips from a professional public speaker. A more detailed 2012 article by Dan Goleman at Psychology Today discussed The Sweet Spot for Achievement - what’s the relationship between stress and performance?

Will homeopathic Natrium Muriaticum reduce stage fright? How could that work?

On February 15, 2015 naturopathic doctor Peter Swanz discussed Homeopathic Courage for Performing in Front of a Crowd. He listed eight remedies:

“For someone that feels timid about appearing in public consider: Carbo vegetabilis, Lycopodium, or Silicea.

For an individual that begins to feel anxiety anticipating an upcoming event or encounter consider: Arsenicum, Carbo vegetabilis, Gelsemium, Lycopodium, Natrium muriaticum, Silicea, or Thuja.
 
An individual that has fear and dread about appearing in public should consider: Carbo vegetabilis, Gelsemium, Lycopodium, or Silicea.
 
For someone suffering from stage fright consider: Gelsemium, Mercurius solubilis, Natrium muriaticum, or Silicea."

I have previously blogged about three of his eight:  Gelsemium, Lycopodium and Silicea (silica). One on Gelsemium is my all-time 10th most popular post. (Another on Argentum nitricum is my 4th most popular post).

What is Natrium muriaticum (or Natrum Muriaticum). It’s just sodium chloride (the main compound in sea salt) obscured by a Latin name. You probably have a shaker in the kitchen. At the web site for the British Homeopathic Association you can even find an article titled with the cryptic abbreviation Nat Mur.

Mr. Swanz doesn’t say what homeopathic dilution to use, but another web page titled Homeopathic Remedies for Anxiety - Natural Ways to cure Anxiety Attacks by Brendon G. Burwell says to use 30C, which means 1 in ten to the 60th power. That is:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
 
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.

When you think about it, there is a big problem with how salt could get into the body from the usual homeopathic remedy form of solid sugar pillules. An Frequently Asked Questions page on the Boiron web site under the heading Should I take my Boiron medicine with or without food? says:

“The most efficient route of administration for oral homeopathic medicines is sublingual absorption (under the tongue).

 ....Since the absorption takes place through the mucous membrane coating on the inside of the mouth, food in the stomach has no influence.”

But in the mouth the solid will be exposed to saliva and dissolved. Are sodium and chloride ions present there? Yes, both already are in saliva. Table 1 in an article by Silvia Chiappin et al titled Saliva specimen: A new laboratory toll for diagnostic and basic investigation that appeared in Clinica Chimica Acta in 2007 (Volume 383, pages 30 to 40) lists a sodium ion content of 5 mmol/liter and a chloride content of 15 mmol/liter  for unstimulated saliva. For stimulated saliva the sodium ion content is 20 to 80 mmol/liter and the chloride content is 30 to 100 15 mmol/liter. Homeopathic remedies will have vastly lower concentrations of sodium chloride, which will be overshadowed by the saliva that dissolves them.

The salt shaker image came from Wikimedia Commons.

There’s really no mystery about how common stage fright is

In mid-June Sara Solovitch’s book Playing Scared: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright came out. She described her journey to overcome performance anxiety about playing the piano. Sara also wrote about it an an article on Overcoming a Lifetime of Stage Fright that appeared in the New York Times on May 30th. She wrote another article in the July issue of Prospect magazine on Anatomy of Stage Fright. An excerpt from her book also has appeared at Salon.com on June 21st.  

The book was reviewed in The Guardian by Scott Stossel on July 6th. It also was reviewed by Joan Acocella in the New Yorker on August 3rd. Her review claimed that:

“A final mystery of stagefright is just how many otherwise capable people suffer from it.”

Actually there is no mystery. The answer for lifetime fear is 21.2% of U.S. adults. That’s based on results from the National Comorbidity Survey - Replication (NCS-R) reported in a 2008  magazine article by by A. M. Ruscio et al. titled Social Fears and Social Phobia in the United States: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. You can read the full text here. In Table 1 it lists the lifetime prevalence of social fears and phobias, with Public speaking/performance at 21.2% for fear and 10.7% for phobia. I blogged about that article in a November 2013 post titled How scary is public speaking or performance? A better infographic showing both fears and phobias. 

What did they mean by the phrase public speaking/performance? What was the exact question? After lots of digging, you eventually can find it listed at a web site called Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys. It is question SO1e, and is precisely about stage fright:

“...was there ever a time in your life when you felt shy, afraid, or uncomfortable in the following situations?)

Acting, performing, or giving a talk in front of an audience?”

I suspect that the other surveys mentioned in my blog post asked the same question about stage fright rather than just fear of speaking.

The image was adapted from All eyes are on you, Mr. President, found at the Library of Congress. It originally was from Puck magazine way back on March 5, 1913.

Joe Kowan found his own path around stage fright

Joe Kowan wanted to play folk music, but had big trouble with performance anxiety. His creative solution was writing a song about that problem. Watch his excellent eight-minute TED talk on How I Beat Stage Fright either at TED or on YouTube.

Last week I was reading Graham Nash’s autobiography, Wild Tales: a rock & roll life. On page 146 he describes how Joni Mitchell compensated for her difficulties in playing the guitar:

“Her acoustic guitar was the entire orchestra. The bass strings became the cellos and double basses, the middle strings the violas, and the high strings, violins. And everything she played was in strange tunings and picking patterns. The way she’d gotten to them was through a childhood brush with polio. As a result, her left arm was a little weaker than the rest of her body, so forming an F chord, which required some strength, presented real problems. To get around it, she learned to play in the open tunings that blues players had used for years, so she wouldn’t have to play that damned F chord.”

Mr. Kowan didn’t write the only song about stage fright. Way back in 1970 the last (and title) song on the third album by The Band was State Fright. You can watch a video of them performing it live in a concert film called The Last Waltz.

Detailed advice on how to overcome the fear of public speaking

 If you are among the 1 in 5 of us with a fear of public speaking, then you should read an excellent book by a clinical psychologist, Peter Desberg, PhD. Speaking Scared Sounding Good: Public Speaking for the Private Person was published in 2007. You can look inside it at Amazon.com. This book contains lots of exercises, stories, and even jokes. Each of the 14 chapters begins with a brief paragraph describing the big idea. They are:

PART ONE: Understanding Your Fear of Public Speaking

1. WHAT REALLY CAUSES STAGE FRIGHT?: Your emotions are a direct result of what’s on your mind. If you think you will give a bad speech, you will be afraid to give that speech. Just thinking about it negatively weeks before the scheduled date can make you tremble. This is because your negative thoughts cause your fear. 

2. IDENTIFYING YOUR FEAR-PROVOKING THOUGHTS: The thoughts that lead to your feelings are not always easy to identify. But once you are able to identify them, they will become the foundation of your plan to control your fear.

3. EVALUATING YOUR FEAR-PROVOKING THOUGHTS: Your fear-provoking thoughts might be based on real-life experiences and may actually be reasonable. On the other hand, they might be the result of exaggeration and/or shaky logic. Identify the thinking process that fuels your fear-provoking thoughts.

4. CONTROLLING YOUR FEAR-PROVOKING THOUGHTS: Reality-testing strategies and positive self-statements can give you a firm handle on your fear-provoking thoughts and can help you get them under control.

PART TWO: Tools for Reducing Your Fear-Provoking Thoughts

5. SETTING GOALS: Set goals that are completely under your control and identify ways to measure how effectively you have met them.

6. LEARNING TO RELAX: Relaxation exercises can help you combat anxiety - your internal response to danger - by lowering it to more manageable levels while making you more alert.

7. DEALING WITH AVOIDANCE AND PROCRASTINATION: Avoidance can lead to missed opportunities in your career and personal life, and procrastination reduces your chances of adequately preparing for a presentation or speech.

8. IMPROVING YOUR MEMORY: Organized information is much easier to remember, especially when the information is personally meaningful to you - and your audience.

9. PRACTICING FOR OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE: After you have thoroughly learned your material, practice under performance conditions. Try to simulate every detail - the minor ones as well as the main ones.

PART THREE: Broadening Your Presentation Skills

10. USING THE PUBLIC SPEAKER’S TOOLBOX: Organize your presentation for maximum effectiveness. State a clear intention for your talk, establish your credentials, and make use of your presentation skills.

11. CREATING THE RIGHT IMPRESSION: Certain strategies can help you be more effective with your audience. Analyzing your audience provides a great deal of information that can improve their impression of you and your presentation.

12. USING HUMOR IN PUBLIC SPEAKING: When used correctly, humor can help you gain the audience’s acceptance and increase the likelihood you’ll be remembered in a good light. Used poorly, it can wreck your presentation. And when used inappropriately, it can even threaten your standing or your job.

13. INTERVIEWING SUCCESSFULLY: The keys to interviewing successfully for a new position are research, preparation, and practice. Take all three very seriously.

14. OVERCOMING SHYNESS: By practicing basic social skills and preparing for social interactions, you can manage the effects of shyness and learn to “sound good” in social situations.

Dr. Desberg is an emeritus professor at California Sate University in Dominguez Hills. Speaking Scared Sounding Good is his third book about stage fright. The other two were Controlling Stagefright : Presenting Yourself to Audiences from One to One Thousand (1988) and No More Butterflies : Overcoming Stagefright, Shyness, Interview Anxiety, & Fear of Public Speaking (1996). His latest funny book is Show Me the Funny.

Taking the gloss off glossophobia

Back in July 2009 I quipped that, rather than a fear of public speaking, glossophobia might as well mean the fear of waxing your car to a high gloss (or possibly lip gloss). It is a compound word that is intended to amaze rather than inform. Searching using that term won’t lead you to much useful information.

The term continues to be used in press releases, often with a claim of how commonly it occurs. There was one on March 1st by Lynn Scarborough that claimed:

“The technical term for this common phobia is Glossophobia which comes from the Greek meaning fear or dread (phobos) of the tongue (glossa). Studies have shown that “tongue fear” or stage fright is shared by over 75% of the population, regardless of sex, nationally or socio-economic level.”

There was another one on February 28th touting a book Tongue-Tied America: Reviving the Art of Verbal Persuasion, by Robert Sayler and Molly Bishop Shadel:

“About 80 percent of educated adults in America suffer from some form of glossophobia, or the fear of public speaking, Sayler said.”

In January 2010 professor Graham Bodie published a very detailed review article on pages 70 to 105 in volume 59 of Communication Education magazine. It was titled “A Racing Heart, Rattling Knees, and Ruminative Thoughts: Defining, Explaining and Treating Public Speaking Anxiety.” How many times did the word glossophobia appear in there? None, nil, nada!

When you look up glossophobia in online dictionaries, you will find that it does not appear in either Merriam-Webster or the Oxford English dictionary, although other “top five” phobias do.

I also tried looking up glossophobia, and the phrases “speech anxiety” and “public speaking anxiety” in nine different magazine databases. My searches were of the full-text of their articles. The results are shown above. Glossophobia showed up a lot in the general ProQuest Central database at the Boise Public Library. It did not show up at all in the more technical ProQuest Social Sciences and ProQuest Psychology databases. Glossophobia showed up very rarely in the Communication Abstrracts and Communication & Mass Media Complete databases at Boise State University (which have the most detailed technical coverage of public speaking)   

Using the word glossophobia says something - that you don’t actually know what you are talking about. It’s really just pseudo-technical terminology.

The nifty mirror image of lip gloss comes from Daniel Case.

Glossophobia might as well mean the fear of waxing your car to a high gloss

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Compare the shiny car at the left with this un-waxed Honda Accord, and its matte camouflage paint job. The owner of this Honda clearly has a serious case of glossophobia, accompanied by delusions of stealth.

If you look in Wikipedia it currently says that “glossophobia or speech anxiety is the fear of public speaking.” Try looking up glossophobia online in the Merriam Webster dictionary - it isn’t there. (It’s also not in the Oxford English Dictionary). Using that word is pedantic nonsense. It will not help you to locate good information about fear of public speaking.

Nevertheless, glossophobia just keeps right on showing up in blog posts by both public speaking coaches (for example, here and here) and by Toastmasters clubs (here and here ).

The word glossophobia is NOT useful jargon because that is not what the psychiatrists and psychologists who study it (and treat it) call that problem. They used to call it public-speaking phobia. More recently they have called it speech anxiety or public speaking anxiety, a subtype of social anxiety.

In the April 2009 issue of the Journal of Anxiety Disorders there is a 9-page article on The Relation Between Public Speaking Anxiety and Social Anxiety: A Review. The word glossophobia never appears.

If you look in Triumph Over Shyness, a book by the psychiatrist Murray B. Stein you will not ever find the word glossophobia used. Neither will you find that word in Laurie Rozakis’s book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Public Speaking.

Now, I also have seen it claimed that glossophobia is not the fear of lip gloss. Perhaps it should be.

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Just knowing the name for something is a very low form of knowledge. In his book of reminisces, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Richard Feynman recalled what his father told him about birds in the following quote:

“You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts.”

Butterflies in Formation (introduction to public speaking): wonderful 9-minute educational film

This funky 1983 stop-motion clay-animated film by John Millstone shows “the nervous advantage”. Those butterflies in your tummy can change from just lying around to fluttering in formation.

Professor Harry Stumbel has a rough audience for his lecture on: “p-p-puppet speaking.” The students hold up signs like “Give it up!” and “Quit while you’re ahead” and someone off-screen also comments: “What a turkey!” Eventually though, his speech takes flight.

Stage Fright and What to Do About It

This is a 9-minute film from 60 years ago that I found on YouTube. It still has some good advice though. There are no planes and only one snake.

This film was written by Margaret Travis, and was part of a series on speech that also included: “Platform Posture and Appearance”, “Using Your Voice”, and “The Function of Gestures.” It was directed by Arthur H. Wolf.

The same team was responsible for other gems like: "Fire Safety is Your Problem", "Caring for Your Toys", "The Good Loser", and "What About Juvenile Delinquency?" Enjoy!

Mayo Clinic psychiatrist discusses overcoming fear of public speaking

Most blog posts or articles on the topic of overcoming fear are just short teaser ads. They basically say either to take my course or to buy my book. Every once in a while there is something more authoritative. Last month a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic, Daniel K. Hall-Flavin, M.D. posted a 950-word web column in reply to the question of How can I overcome my fear of public speaking? Doctor Hall-Flavin discussed the following points:

1. Don't avoid it.

2. Know your topic inside and out

3. Get organized.

4. Use audio and visual aids — for yourself, and for the audience.

5. Practice, and then practice some more.

6. Practice in front of people you know.

7. Know your audience.

8. Double-check the room setup.

9. Relax.

10. Focus on your material, not your audience.

11. Trust your audience.

12. Don't be afraid of a moment of silence.

13. Recognize your success.

14. Get support.

Under the last point, about getting support, he said that:

“You aren't alone in your fear of public speaking. There are nonprofit and commercial groups out there to help you learn and practice the skills you need to overcome your fear and become the effective, confident speaker you want to be. One effective resource is Toastmasters, a nonprofit organization with local chapters that focuses on training people in speaking and leadership skills.”