Psychoquackery on BBC Radio 4

[MeSci]

All those test! Shocking! Yet those tests do sometimes find something. That is the point of the tests. Further as more and better tests become available it could be expected that more and more MUSes patients will have definitive diagnoses.

This is marketing of economic medicine, and managed medicine - both financially managed and managing of patients. Yet its also about parking patients in the too hard basket.

To me it seems like a kind of 'New Disenlightenment', of which there are other examples in the world. Ignorance, superstition and stupidity trying to override civilisation, science and human progress.

Maybe there needs to be a new version of the quote attributed to Burke - something like "The only thing necessary for the triumph of ignorance is for intelligent people to do nothing."

 

[sarah darwins]

OK, letter written to Inside Health. Will comment here in the unlikely event I get more than a boilerplate reply.

 

[Sasha]

Disenlightenment

Great name for a campaign, right there.

 

[alex3619]

Maybe there needs to be a new version of the quote attributed to Burke - something like "The only thing necessary for the triumph of ignorance is for intelligent people to do nothing."

Maybe we should be quoting you!

 

[alex3619]

So I would prefer an 'alternative' word if we are going to do the same with psychiatry!

I don't disagree. Its just that I didn't think of an alternative to "alternative". Many psych treatments are flawed, or limited, or have very little reliable evidence for their effectiveness.

What concerns me is that keeping most of psych inside medicine is giving it a rubber stamp of approval. It opens up legal problems because medical testimony/opinion is used in legal cases, forced treatment and sectioning. Recognizing this is only opinion, and not verifiable fact, is important.

 

[Snowdrop]

So scientists too are prone to unjustified assumptions - that clinical correlates are causal rather than consequential (on something).

Fair point. We make a little progress in scientific investigative methods and everyone (scientists) wants to claim the prize for explaining what it means. Tests are also interpretive and speculative until there is consistency.

 

[Snowdrop]

Maybe there needs to be a new version of the quote attributed to Burke - something like "The only thing necessary for the triumph of ignorance is for intelligent people to do nothing."

I think the quote is an approximation of what Burke said. He was discussing evil.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
But ignorance and intelligence works too.

 

[Snowdrop]

But the whole business has been co-opted and commodified and turned into science.

There is a label for unscientific and nonscientific claims that pretend to be scientific, and to use that scientific label as a badge of authority. Its called pseudoscience.

Yes, pseudoscience is a better word for it.

 

[MeSci]

Maybe we should be quoting you!

Well - it would be paraquoting, wouldn't it?

 

[Woolie]

I find it very concerning that this acronym (MUS) might be making its way into common use, as it allows the psychoquackers to cast a very wide net. It's actually a way for them to claim maximum territory.

Yes, and the term MUS itself appears to make no claims as to the cause of the symptoms. A psychological cause is just subtly implied in the way the term it used. If anyone ever asks for justification for that claim, there is still complete deniability!

 

[Woolie]

PS I'm an academic in Psychology, and one of a number of research-trained Psycs on this forum. I reckon we're useful to the CFS community. We can do more than just complain about the dodgy Psyc studies, we can offer critiques based on our knowledge of research design best practice and interpretation. Many of us are working hard on the community's behalf as we speak.

So please do take care not to generalise too much about how bullshit Psychology is and how stupid all Psychologists are.

 

[jimells]

So please do take care not to generalise too much about how bullshit Psychology is and how stupid all Psychologists are.

Yes, I expect some comments (cough, cough) must be tough to read. I hope you can take a little comfort from the fact that most folks think highly of Lenny Jason and respect his research.

 

[A.B.]

PS I'm an academic in Psychology, and one of a number of research-trained Psycs on this forum. I reckon we're useful to the CFS community. We can do more than just complain about the dodgy Psyc studies, we can offer critiques based on our knowledge of research design best practice and interpretation. Many of us are working hard on the community's behalf as we speak.

So please do take care not to generalise too much about how bullshit Psychology is and how stupid all Psychologists are.

Point taken. Unfortunately that's the only side some of us have ever seen of both professions.

 

[Woolie]

Yes, I expect some comments (cough, cough) must be tough to read. I hope you can take a little comfort from the fact that most folks think highly of Lenny Jason and respect his research.

My request was just that people be respectful and don't overgeneralise. I think it's fine to have a view of what a discipline is about (good or bad) and also what science is and should be. You don't have to be a scientist. Many posts here were very interesting, and well thought out. But others just said psychology is bullshit and psychologists not as smart as people who do real science.

If you would like my view, here it is.

* A lot of psychology research is very badly done. I have low confidence in many of the findings that we have obtained in the last few decades. In particular, publication practices need to be overhauled, and so do some of the standard statistical approaches. If you'd like to know more about this, I'd be happy to share.

* A lot of research in other disciplines is also poor too. But sometimes it's harder for a layperson to see where the flaws lie. Jonathan Edwards describes poor work in his area as "immunobabble". My own area, which is neuroscience and neuropsychology, is generally believed to be "real science". But I can tell you first hand, a lot of the work is very poor.

* Science is not a topic area, but an approach to asking questions. In some disciplines not generally considered to be science, there is research that adopts a scientific method and does it very well, such as archaeology.

* Science is also not just about observing and reporting factual information. Its about developing theories that account for that information, and making predictions about other things we might expect to see. Therefore, it always involves theorising. The more complex the area, the wider the gap between observation and theory. And the bigger the risk of getting it wrong. Examples of highly complex disciplines include quantum physics, immunology, psychology and neuroscience.

* I'm sympathetic to @alex3619 's view that some of the weakest research in the behavioural sciences comes from the domain of psychiatry. I think perhaps many psychiatrists aren't trained to think critically about their discipline. But I would never say that all psychiatry research is poor. Some of it is excellent.

 

[alex3619]

On the view that some psychiatry is sound science, I think the National Institutes of Mental Health in the USA is working toward a whole new approach, with more stringent research requirements. I hope they can pull this off, as one really good way to fix psychiatry would be to have a fully fledged alternative in place before there were major changes. It would then be about managing a transition. On the downside I read comments like the NIMH are not clinically minded, they are more research oriented.

 

[Sean]

* Science is also not just about observing and reporting factual information. Its about developing theories that account for that information, and making predictions about other things we might expect to see. Therefore, it always involves theorising. The more complex the area, The wider the gap between observation and theory. And the bigger the risk of getting it wrong.

I subscribe to the view that science is the interplay or interface between evidence (experiment or observation) and theory, both informing and constraining the other, and it is rarely easy to map out in a nice clean mistake-free way.