Lightning Process study in Norway - Given Ethics Approval February 2022

Interesting that they state it is 'necessary'. It feels that they are one step away from admitting they are measuring placebo effects.

 

Always good to see researchers taking the randomised aspect of ‘randomised controlled studies’ seriously (not).

 

That's a pretty salient acknowledgement. Does anyone know of other studies where participants have been tossed out for not sufficiently believing in the effectiveness of the treatment??

 

How is that different from a study of medical astrology that excludes people who don't believe in astrology?

It isn't. Obviously. But decades of increasing bias have lead to a normalization of fraudulent behavior like this, so much that any criticism will fall on deaf ears. Medicine believes in the magical power of the mind, of motivation, more than ever. Even though this nonsense has been around and failed for decades.

What incredible regression this profession is going through. The cutting edge is advancing rapidly thanks to technology and scientific breakthroughs, while the foundations are crumbling.

 

Don't remember that one, but I will never forget Simon Wessely addressing this "placebo" in PACE, saying something to the effect of "the placebo is one of the most powerful interventions we have".

A placebo is literally a null comparator, comparing something to nothing, and by the definition of how clinical trials operate, even if a placebo were seen as anything but random noise or regression to the mean, it is by definition the least effective treatment in all of medicine, since every single treatment has to be more effective than nothing.

 

You can bet that they will still be given high grade for randomization, since they will use a pseudorandom number generator after their initial filter.

Cookie points for doing wrong. Evidence-based medicine is not a serious paradigm.

 

Wasn't it in Norway that they (Wyller?) blamed the failure of a CBT trial on some imagined "negative vibes" about it in the press? Or some BS like that? When you allow people to get away with fraud and BS, no surprise, all they can do is optimize for fraud and BS. It's like an entire education system where you can actually get high grades out of "my dog ate all my homework, and assignments, and exams, again and again."

Also isn't it "famous" anyway that the "placebo" is supposed to work even when you know it's what you're getting and don't have to believe in it? So they're really just pinning this on motivation instead. Which another recent study did by excusing their failure, no differences between control and treatment, by deciding that simply being motivated into participating is good enough to... produce the same outcome? Why even bother with controlled studies if you can simply decide whatever anyway.

Damn it's really getting worse and no matter how many issues we raise about this, the bar just keeps getting lower.

 

Presumably it would be possible to do a randomised control trial amongst people who believe LP can cure them. You would identify people who believed then randomly assign them to LP and a control arm, but you would have to ensure those in the control arm also believed that the control activity could cure them too for it to be a meaningful control.

And still all of this still fails to address to address the lack of objective outcomes.

 

"On the other hand, motivation and a hope that the treatment will work is necessary for a psychoeducational method such as the one used in the study to be effective."

What a load of wooooooo. Nope, it has to be coherent with the person's experiencing, make sense practically and intellectually and not be pure persuasion to try and convince someone of something that is not clear or objective.

 

From listening to LP practitioners, my understanding is that the goal of the LP is to give people hope, a new way of seeing their illness and symptoms, and a curative placebo effect. And the true illness of people with ME is that we believe we have an untreatable illness.

So wouldn't a sceptical patient be the classic ME patient? Can you have a more severe form of the delusion that is ME, than to be critical of people that claim to have a cure?

Wouldn't this be like excluding a patient from a depression study because they are too depressed?

 

It used to be called parapsychology I think back when that area of things like this and spoon bending and so on were used to test peoples ability to learn research design (and ergo when you wanted to remove bias or ‘coercion’ bring possible fir results)

so the first part of the ‘treatment’once they’ve recruited is to apply a filter to only keep participants who confirm they think and believe the treatment will improve their health long term. Then test ‘effectiveness’ by asking questions to that new sample about whether they have faith it’s making them feel better and compare it to the old sample which did include those who weren’t coerced into belief ? Oh none of which is long enough follow up that anyone has a chance to really test whether it just makes them run around on adrenaline telling themselves the pain is gain and how clever they are gif keeping in with it.

 

Given they apparently keep the ‘what happens on camp stays on camp’ secret they could easily come up with an alternative fake version to account for disappointment effect in the control group of believers too.

I don’t know about the prospect of them being led to believe they’ll end with a career/business in becoming an LP trsiner themselves though - which isnt a small part of the coercion package and doesn’t really require you to either get more well or really believe in LP (just be able to sell or fake that) to do ?

 

That's a slimy response.

But the test in those trials isn't whether the drug was in their system... ? it was whether it objectively worked based on proper measures and regulated research design, as well as yellow-card for harms over long-term follow up. Only in their magical world do they try and have it both ways by ignoring rules of decency and relying on noone looking at their bias, coercion and research design

Oh and of course in drug trials there are normally double-blinded controls to avoid all this crap ie so those running the experiment can't/have no point in coercing those who have taken the actual drug into sayign and doing what they want (because they might have been given the placebo - whcih in normal trials would be subtracted from the effect of treatment arm impact). It therefore doesn't matter whether those taking x drug 'believe' so what utter nonsense the man talks.

MLM 'medicine' shall we call it?

 

how many LP practitioners does it take to change a lightbulb?

Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change.