A Qualitative Study of the Views of Patients With [MUS] on The BodyMind Approach®: Employing Embodied Methods and Arts.., 2020, Payne and Brooks

Full title: A Qualitative Study of the Views of Patients With Medically Unexplained Symptoms on The BodyMind Approach®: Employing Embodied Methods and Arts Practices for Self-Management

Open access, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.554566/full

 

I read it until I couldn't stomach the constant buzzwords and pseudoprofundity and clever attempt to secretly cure conversion disorder anymore. It's not worth reading.

 

Oh dear me.

 

What is this BodyMind Approach with a registered trade mark which does not provide any financial or commercial conflict of interests?

 

If just one of my nostrils could do that then I would have been able to have a career in kids entertainment....

 

Somebody read a little too much Deepak Chopra. One is too many. One anything.

 

So, the conclusion I drew from this is:

If a researcher uses a qualitative method, they can write a whole paper on themes that align with their own hopes and beliefs, without ever mentioning any of those that might run counter to them.

Reading the paper, you would go away thinking that there was unanimous satisfaction with this "body-mind" programme, and I think this is extremely unlikely with any programme, no matter how amazing. So looks very fishy to me.

In Psychology, qualitative methodologies are often not accorded the same respect as other methods, and the people who work with them often feel undervalued. I personally think that qual methods are extremely important. But this paper demonstrates the limits of those methods. You absolutely cannot use them to assess the effectiveness of a programme that you're heavily invested in, because there are no universally agreed checks and balances within the methods. Which leaves them wide open to researcher bias and expectations.

Even the shitty questionnaires the BPSers use at least allow for the possibility of disconfirmation.

To me, this research reads like an ad for a patented weight loss programme, the type that includes (carefully selected) customer endorsements. No, its worse than that, because there is no legal requirement to place a warning underneath those endorsements, saying "individual results may vary"

 

I have no words.


Edit to add:

1) interestingly her editors and reviewers are located in Israel. Does that mean anything?

2)Helen Payne published this last year:


Medically Unexplained Symptoms and Attachment Theory: The BodyMind Approach

This article discusses how The BodyMind Approach®(TBMA) addresses insecure attachment styles in medically unexplained symptoms (MUS). Insecure attachment styles are associated with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and MUS (Adshead and Guthrie, 2015) and affect sufferers’ capacity to self-manage. The article goes on to make a new hypothesis to account for TBMA’s effectiveness (Payne and Brooks, 2017), that is, it addresses insecure attachment styles, which may be present in some MUS sufferers, leading to their capacity to self-manage. Three insecure attachment styles (dismissive, pre-occupied and fearful) associated with MUS are discussed. TBMA is described and explanations provided of how TBMA has been specifically designed to support people’s insecure attachment styles. Three key concepts to support insecure attachment styles involved in the content of TBMA are identified and debated: (a) emotional regulation; (b) safety; and (c) bodymindfulness. There is a rationale for the design of TBMA as opposed to psychological interventions for this population. The programme’s structure, facilitation and content, takes account of the three insecure attachment styles above. Examples of how TBMA works with their specific characteristics are presented. TBMA has been tested and found to be effective during delivery in the United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS). Improved self-management has potential to reduce costs for the NHS and in General Practitioner time and resources
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01818/full

3) paging @Hilda Bastian and @Carolyn Wilshire... there may be others...

 

Ok I have more to say. This part is particularly cruel and insensitive:

and then this indicates where they are going with this...

 

And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Also if the Moon were made of cheese we could all feast for eternity, therefore world hunger has been solved so let's stop all efforts, there will be no questions this is obviously REAL SCIENCETM.

 

I see where all this health psychology is going, all the emphasis on mind-body, all the watering down of intellect, and clumping and lumping the real with their imaginary.

Why yes, there are money-making opportunities arising from the MUS designation, a nation of practitioners shall arise.

Are we as a culture just running out of empathy with those who suffer so that doctors, health psychologists, therapists, and psychiatrists can feel more competent and get more job satisfaction by dumping the difficult to understand into the sewer of MUS?

It is ivory tower imbecility, basking in conceptualizing nonsense, a lack of clinical acumen, a huge missing chunk of empathy and it's intellectually dishonest, wrong, wrong-headed and I assume, headed for the grave in the next five years, I hope.

 

I find it impossible to believe that this ever really happens. Apart from anything else, if I ask for an appointment to see a doctor I get given one that can be 3 - 6 weeks in the future. It will never be "tomorrow".

Edit : I'm talking about getting an appointment pre-Covid. I have no idea how to see a doctor since Covid started.

 

I think that is what they call evidence based medicine

 

If i get sick, i want to see a doctor. I do not want to be in a circle talking about my emotion and psycho-babble stuff. I do not want to have to meditate each and every time there is a meeting and i do not want to hear about how someone felt liberated after dancing in last week’s session. I do not want to have my disease diluted into something where all of the dead end diseases end up, where terms like ‘catastrophizing’ and ‘somatizing’ are commonly implied.

i’ll be damned if this stuff flies for the Long-COVID ER junior doctors who got sick and land in that kind of health care.

 

This is an example of medical Gerrymandering (Moving the goalposts, dishonest definitions). It's interesting that they admit they mean psychosomatic by saying MUS. I wish we didn't have to deal with the outdated belief that anything we can't explain is psychosomatic still in 2020. Lets hope #LongCovid changes things.

I agree that qualitative outcomes can be useful where quantitative fails, sometimes it's like putting a square peg in a round hole.