Internet based self-help randomized trial for motor Functional Neurological Disorder (SHIFT), 2020, Stone et al

Paywall, https://n.neurology.org/content/early/2020/07/20/WNL.0000000000010381
Not available via Sci hub at time of posting

 

hmm looks a bit shifty to me

 

Given the results, they could have described their study more accurately by removing the F...

 

Shut up and take this online course.

 

Exactly. They might also enjoy watching The Wizard of Oz, but it won't help their condition.

 

If it's about satisfaction, I would prefer to eat a steak more often instead of reading a website.

 

would NHS pay for that as a "valuable addition" to your care even if it's not "an effective treatment in its own right"?

 

Maybe. Are there any cattle farming industry representatives involved in writing the treatment guidelines?

 

I see what you did there!

https://twitter.com/user/status/1052971866443444227



Also note, from: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02589886

I therefore suspect the "self-help" website in the intervention is at least partially based on Jon Stone's neurosymptoms dot org (no direct link please).

 

Eww...

Yes, they "work" in the sense that they change the psychological state of patients in the way that would be expected by being given some treatment, and they change brains in the same sense as well.

Disease that can be measured objectively don't meaningfully change because of a placebo. And ordinary things like watching TV also changes your brain.

So do placebos affect diseases that can't be measured objectively? We don't know. It seems very unlikely due to all the other diseases where this can be verified and shown not to be the case.

 

Silly people doing silly things. But at what point do authorities stop funding things that are clearly worthless? It never, ever works. I don't fault quacks for continuing to abuse the system and fund their pet theories but at some point authorities are expected to stop enabling silliness and waste of resources.

This has been an issue for a while and if this were a serious field there would be demands to disambiguate. In all trials that produce no useful results there is some level of "satisfaction". That's a meaningless term, it has no clinical value. People can be satisfied with a quick shoulder massage or free beer or a bunch of other silly things.

What it shows is that "satisfaction" in this context has nothing whatsoever to do with usefulness. So clearly the very concept of satisfaction should be reevaluated, because otherwise it leads exactly to this kind of abuse where they admit failure in producing any benefits beyond "satisfaction" and still argue it is useful because satisfaction.

Silly, silly people. Why are silly people enabled like this, given millions in endless funding for doing the exact same things over and over again for decades on end?

 

Someone was nice to them.
Someone assured them their experience was real.

There are a surprising amount of FND pstients who are not aware they are being gaslit precisely due to the above .
These may also be the basis for the " satisfaction " rating.

Also explains why there are usually no proper control arms.