"Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy the Gold Standard for Psychotherapy?"

[Dolphin]

This is on mental disorders so not that relevant to ME/CFS.

But perhaps it might be of interest to the odd person.

It does raise some interesting points about what gets to be seen as evidence-based.
For example, if there are more trials of a therapy, the evidence can look stronger for it than for therapies that have been tested less.

Also the issue of research allegiance where researchers publish research on therapies that are interested in and how therapies do in trials is linked to the allegiances of the investigators.

So nothing particularly new for a lot of people.

Viewpoint
September 21, 2017
Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy the Gold Standard for Psychotherapy?The Need for Plurality in Treatment and Research

http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2654783

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Interesting to this odd person.

Particularly the poor score on bias risk from Cochrane. My recent impression is that Cochrane are overgenerous.

So maybe nothing particularly new, but it helps to shake things down a bit more in the mind!

 

[BurnA]

Some exerpts for any other odd interested people.

For an evidence-based treatment, the quality of evidence is as important as the quantity of evidence.
A recent meta-analysis using criteria of the Cochrane risk of bias tool reported that only 17% (24 of 144) of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) of CBT for anxiety and depressive disorders were of high quality.1

Researcher allegiance, which is the researcher’s belief in the superiority of a treatment, may influence results in comparative psychotherapy outcome research, representing an uncontrolled factor in comparisons of treatment efficacy.4 For several studies carried out by CBT researchers, high risk of researcher allegiance has recently been identified.4 In essence, the treatment conditions against which CBT was compared were designed in a way that essential curative factors were excluded