I’ve said it before and will undoubtedly say it again. Trudie Chalder, King’s College London’s mathematically and factually challenged professor of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), is a one-trick pony. She writes what is essentially the same bad paper based on the same unfounded assumptions over and over again. Her apparent professional success represents, at least when it comes to this specific domain of inquiry, the broken state of scientific research, the triumph of mediocrity and incompetence, and the ethical bankruptcy of leading medical journals. From outside the culture of slavish deference to authority that seems to infuse British academia, Professor Chalder’s continuing ability to obtain major grant funding and publish endless muck is astonishing. Is there no mercy in this world for those of us forced by professional obligations to read this unceasing stream of sewage?
In Professor Chalder’s most recent study, she and her colleagues find an association between worsening fatigue and two of her favorite constructs– “all-or-nothing behavior” and “catastrophic thinking”–in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The odds ratios are pretty tiny, however, at 1.13 for all-or-nothing behavior and 1.18 for catastrophic thinking—meaning that the odds of worsening fatigue are only marginally higher in those demonstrating these purportedly unhelpful or behavioral or cognitive patterns. (The study was published by the journal Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.)
However banal and inconsequential, this sort of statistical finding is catnip for Professor Chalder. She seems never to have met an association she couldn’t try to spin as a causal relationship in order to justify the promotion of CBT as a solution. In this case, she seems to interpret this very minimal association to mean that these two identified patterns—all-or-nothing behavior and catastrophic thinking—are major factors in generating the reported worsening of fatigue.
