"Salvaging psychotherapy research: a manifesto" by James C. Coyne (renegade psychologist)

James C. Coyne is an influential psychologist who isn't afraid to highlight problems in psychological research.

It starts:

He makes lots of criticisms of the field, but of course, knowing about such problems is useful for understanding and critiquing any type of research.

 

A few more quotes:

 

A mutual protection racket.

It all comes back to the lack of genuinely objective standards. Until they and their ideas are required to meet such standards then they can, and will, continue to muddy the waters and waste human lives by the truckload.

 

These are things we have been saying for years, most notably about the PACE trial.

 

PDW's Cochrane review?

[My bolding]

I agree with these last points. Indeed I am working toward arguments that major culture shifts are required in areas way beyond even psychotherapy and psychogenic medicine. Yet it is in psychogenic medicine that the issues are most egregious.

 

An outstanding example of how reviews/meta-analyses should not be done.

 

The problem is psychologists make a living selling therapy. Do we expect them to publish research showing that their product is defective?

 

Do anyone know what is the threshold (if such a threshold exists) above what a medication is considered as efficient or not? Would the 22% PACE trial “recovery” be sufficient in a pharmacology trial?

 

I think that effect size also matters.

 

A pharmacology trial would usually be double-blinded. The psychobabblers do usually avoid even single-blinded trials.

I am not sure if a medication could be considered efficient without proper controls and blinding.

 

We know that they talk of 22% of (CBT|GET)+SMC but the SMC on its own has a recovery rate under their definition of 15% thus they are over claiming.

We know that they lowered the thresholds post hoc to a level where they are below the trial entry criteria. We don't know if the trial steering committee approved this change and if they did what evidence was presented to them. We also know the published reason for changing the threshold for the sf36 physical function score was wrong and we know that the journal publishing the PACE recovery paper have been told it is wrong and have chosen not to make a correction.

 

I perfectly know that, that's why I used " ". Maybe I wasn't sufficiently explicit. I meant: "Even with their overexagerated recovery results do they meet basic pharmacological trial standards?"

 

Of course they don't. it's very hard to do.

I have been looking for CBT trials that were as close as possible to pharmacological trail standards and so far i haven't found any but one that found CBT was ineffective for most conditions they are attempting to treat.

if someone knows of reliable studies please let me know.

 

How do you blind a patient to psychotherapy? Its chalk and cheese. Inability to blind psychotherapy is one of the reasons that so much of this research is unreliable, and why these studies, even if using RCT format in other ways, are not the highest grade of evidence.

 

On PACE, isn't it also the case if what I hear about FOI information is correct, that over half of the recovered patients started that way, at least in terms of SF-36? Maybe someone who knows more about that can comment? If you halve that figure, say six percent, and add it to fifteen percent, you get .... twenty one percent. We need all the data from the trials published. It looks very much like a total non-result, a proof of the null hypothesis, is being spun as a massive success.

 

If true, that would be a serious blow against the already weak PACE results.

 

That is why I want it confirmed if I can.

 

There is a thread on this here that I had forgotten: http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...ranges-for-cfq-and-sf36-pf-at-baseline.22366/

I hope to comment more later.

 

An open-access published paper based on this has now been published. See: http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...rch-a-manifesto-published-article-coyn.33705/