Members of the CBT/GET ideological brigades produce a gusher of dreck, and I don’t bother commenting on most of their work. Life’s too short.
So it can be easy to lose sight of how flawed and truly awful each individual paper can be. But even among this flood of scientifically deficient research, a recent paper in the journal
Occupational Medicine distinguishes itself. I’ve blogged about it
here and
here. Dr Mark Vink and Dr Keith Geraghty tweeted about it, respectively,
here and
here.
The article’s elementary errors about its own core findings reflect a startling degree of incompetence. I had to read the paper a batch of times to convince myself that corresponding author Professor Trudie Chalder and her colleagues had mangled basic statistics so badly. It seems very unlikely that anyone would directly contradict the data in their own tables and make such self-evident misstatements intentionally. It’s not as if these specific errors enhanced the attractiveness of the reported findings.....................
