No, I think that is an overgeneralisation that seems to happen quite often here. Every "BPS" study posted here seems to get shot down before even looking at it. (Yes, I know that's an overgeneralisation as well, but that's the impression that I get, and it puts a lot of people off joining the forum, including myself).
I can understand how it might seem to you
@dundrum. But this isn't how the forum works.
I am a professor of medicine and had no real contact with psychological medicine and BPS approaches all my career other than being a bit wary of rheumatology colleagues who were enthusiastic about psychology but never seemed to have any evidence for what they said.
I got interested in ME/CFS because I was asked to advise on immunology. I reviewed the research scene to try to get an idea what the condition was about. I attended a conference at Bristol where Peter Denton White made a presentation designed to show how maliciously anti-scientific patients were to criticise his PACE trial. I was shocked not just that a medic should produce such a manipulative and dishonest presentation but that he should have so little regard for patients that he was happy to present with many of them present. The arrogance and stupidity were mind-blowing.
So I have seen ten years looking at the BPS side along with the biomedical side and discussing here. What I see of the biomedical side is mostly poor quality studies done with naive enthusiasm, but also stuff that looks to be driven by commercial gain. We pull that stuff apart all the time. I also see a few good quality studies, many with negative outcomes, but useful ones. In the last five years we have had some very good quality studies that are beginning to produce what may be replicable meaningful positive data.
On the BPS side I just see self-delusion, arrogance, disdain for the patient community and manipulation of the politics in ways that are sometimes probably illegal. The tampering with NICE in 2021 was even more shocking than White. When I say BPS I mean in an ME/CFS context. We are all aware that fear makes you shake and puts your adrenaline up. That is not the issue. The issue is pretending that you have meaningful theories and evidence-based treatments in relation to ME/CFS when it is all scam to make jobs for your friends.
To call this a bullshit crowd may seem extreme but it isn't. As I say, as someone who has worked in medical academia for fifty years I had absolutely no idea just how intellectually dishonest a group of colleagues could be. I didn't start out with this view. I just repeatedly found myself more and more gobsmacked as to how bad the situation was.
The brain retraining idea is completely unfounded. The neurophysiology is entirely bogus, as has become clear to anyone seriously studying the field. Sure, you can find yourself changing your viewpoint but nobody has the faintest idea how that works at a neuronal level. You can spend a million hours searching the literature and you will never actually find a testable mechanistic theory. When I don't work on ME/CFS I work on the physics of the brain so this is very familiar territory.
The bottom line is that there is no bias here. You may think that my perspective is that ME/CFS 'must be physical and not psychological'. But I actually have no commitment to any such point of view. If there was some evidence I would accept a neuropsychiatric basis for at least some cases. What I see very clear evidence of is that the psychological medicine people have not only no idea what they are talking about and no evidence for having valid treatments but have behaved seriously dishonestly. To the extent of trying to get junior researchers dismissed from universities and manipulate public policy. I have been accused of being 'disloyal' to my academic colleagues, but as far as I am concerned my only loyalty was ever to the patients. The idea that it should be to my colleagues pretty much summed up their way of thinking to me.
To take the idea of brain retraining seriously people here need to hear some actual testable theory and to have an account of the methodology that is supposed to deliver the result. We know there are no valid trials but we don't even see any evidence of anything testable. If the people who write popular books had any science behind them we would see the citations of the original research on PubMed. There is nothing I can find of relevance. It may be a shock to find a scam of these proportions right on one's doorstep but it may be easy to forget just how recently all medicine was a scam. maybe it is just that the psychologists have never moved on.
