Digital Behavior Change Interventions for Younger Children With Chronic Health Conditions: Systematic Review, 2020, Crawley, Loades et al

Open access, https://www.jmir.org/2020/7/e16924/

My bolding.

 

Repeat something often enough and it becomes the established truth?

 

Many of those "interventions" have been used for years and the best they can come up with is that they "have promise". They do not show, they "have" the greatest promise.

What kind of nonsense is that?

Over the last several years I have had the displeasure of skimming (reading this stuff should be classified as torture) dozens of papers on this topic. This field has exactly two themes and only two themes: 1) how to make the stuff that's been used in practice for years actually work and 2) why are the patients so resistant to it. That's about 90% of the work going directly to those two themes, with the rest being peripheral but mostly related to those two themes.

Billions of have been spent on the broader concepts. Thousands of people have invested their career dating back more than a century. Research and development in those conditions has been blocked on the basis that this is better than nothing and therefore good enough, despite decades of failure in practice.

This is genuinely criminally insane. There are millions of lives at stake here and these people can't stop jerking each other over how great what they are accomplishing is while at the same being utterly puzzled that it doesn't actually work and that the patients hate it. This may not be the letter of the horror that happened in asylums before publicizing the scandals ended the practice but it is very much in that same spirit. The walls may have disappeared but the mental and physical torture are every bit as criminal.

 

The funding bodies for this genre of health propaganda need to start paying attention to their fiscal responsibilities. Instead of systematic reviews of the literature they need to consider total costs sunk into decades long repeats of the same thing and has that provided them real value as opposed to larger funding (per study) directed toward science and the discovery of new information relating to how the body works and how the broken bits can be modified to actually improve health.

The longer they keep this up the more the scale tips in favour of science.

Edit: to remove a word for clarity

 

Yes, absolutely. There are 10 authors on this "super important" study. If they each spent 10 weeks total on this at an average of $2000 weekly salary plus benefits, that's $200,000 that could have been spent on something useful. (sorry for $, I know this is the U.K.).

 

If your studies are broadly crap, your meta analysis will be broadly crap.

Or did I miss something?