THE SMILE TRIAL (part 1)
Why the trial should never have been allowed in the first place.
The first of three blogs on the SMILE trial.
There is no evidence
the Lightning Process (LP), a mish-mash of elements of cognitive behavioural therapy, neurolinguistic programming, hypnotherapy, life coaching and osteopathy, is anything other than quackery. For decades Phil Parker has made claims for its efficacy, including as a treatment for myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), but no proper trial has ever supported these claims.
The
Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) guidance is clear:
To date, neither the ASA nor CAP has seen robust evidence for the health benefits of LP. Advertisers should take care not to make implied claims about the health benefits of the three-day course and must not refer to conditions for which medical supervision should be sought.
There are people who claim to have been helped, of course, but such claims are made for all bogus therapies. It seems that some people are simply amenable to these interventions. In addition, perhaps there are those who have become stuck in a rut, experiencing a generic chronic fatigue, believing themselves to have ME, and who are helped to kickstart their lives again by the LP. Since there is no biomarker for ME, diagnosis of the illness can be difficult:
40% of patients in an ME clinic may not actually have ME.
There is currently no treatment for ME, so it is understandable that some patients would be easy prey for and would seek more information about interventions hawked about with exaggerated claims.