Epidemiologist criticizes Perrin Technique for ME as unsupported osteopathic "quackery" and "useless charlatanism"

[gbells]

Epidiomologist Dr. Gideon called the Perrin Technique for ME useless charlatanism due to misrepresenting research articles about it to claim more validity than it actually has.

Perrin's website currently claims:

Research over past 30 years has validated Dr Perrin’s theories.

However no research is posted to the site and a search of the existing literature shows no studies validating it.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=perrin+chronic+fatigue+syndrome

Here's Gideon's article:

Sadly, these therapies are often little more than poorly-evidenced nonsense peddled to the desperate after everything else has failed...

Perrin is an osteopath** who gained a PhD from the University of Salford for his research into — shockingly — osteopathic manipulation for the diagnosis and treatment of ME. In other words, a doctor but not that kind of doctor.

There are a few big issues with this piece of research, but there’s one thing that stands out:

This has nothing whatsoever to do with treatment of ME.

So anyone claiming from this research that osteopathy can treat ME is just wrong. You could try and quote Perrin’s other work, but to paraphrase a JAMA review of ME treatments, they weren’t done very well so you can’t really use them as evidence for anything at all.

But this study didn’t use the ‘gold standard’ diagnosis for ME. Among other things, ME diagnosis requires a long and detailed clinical history, but none of the clinicians were allowed to talk to the patients whilst performing their exams.

Here we come nicely back around to the Perrin technique. You see, there are a lot of nice physiological terms in there, but when you dig a little deeper it appears to be based on what can only be termed pseudoscientific nonsense.

If this sounds like nonsense to you, that’s because it is. The cranial rhythmic impulse is a vital part of craniosacral therapy, otherwise known as useless charlatanism, and has been discredited as an objective phenomenon in controlled studies for quite some time.

However, I’m very cautious. Osteopathy is, at best, tenuously related to science, with many practitioners making claims that are completely unsupported by evidence. The field of ME is also filled with pseudoscience parading as medicine, with largely-discredited ideas such as vaccine denial often used by alternative practitioners to peddle ineffective treatments to the desperate.

Add to this the fact that the evidence suggests that osteopathic treatment is useless for ME, and you’ve got a biologically dubious diagnostic test that is based on a technique that probably doesn’t work. Not great.

Bottom line? The headlines were wrong.

This isn’t a breakthrough for Myalgic Encephalitis sufferers.

Osteopathy Can’t Cure Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis
Nov 21, 2017

 

[Rufous McKinney]

Epidiomologist Dr. Gideon called the Perrin Technique for ME useless charlatanism due to misrepresenting research articles about it to claim more validity than it actually has.

I was reading that Epidemologists...aren't medical doctors. So there is that.

if the technique helps with lymph movement and flow, thats likely a good thing.

As to whether that would cure ME, I would doubt it personally.

 

[gbells]

I was reading that Epidemologists...aren't medical doctors. So there is that.

Epidemiologists know research and the criticism is valid. The fact is that the studies they are claiming validate their method don't and the osteopathic techniques aren't validated either. Why would anyone think that ME is due to blockage of lymphatic flow? How would this eliminate the chronic viruses that caused it in the first place? I don't doubt that physical therapy techniques are helpful to break up adhesions but you still have to address the underlying causes somehow and I don't see Perrin doing that. However, I can see that patients would feel better because of the hands-on care and release of adhesions but long term it isn't a cure.