Lightning Process study in Norway - Given Ethics Approval February 2022

Wow. That's pretty much an admission that the 'treatment' is at best placebo, and at worst brainwashing, not health care. If it only works if you believe it works, it's not a real treatment. And it carries the danger that side effects and deterioration will be ignored and not reported, so is unethical and unscientific.
 
Kalliope said:
Just including from the google translated letter reasoning why this was "necessary":

"You were recently included in the study. According to information from some people involved in the study, you have over time […] been active in social media with criticism of a biopsychosocial understanding of ME and of professionals who have such an understanding. You have also been critical of the study in social media. This is of course completely legitimate and it is healthy to have professional discussions.

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. Inclusion of people who have no motivation to participate in the study can create a situation that challenges the quality of the PhD work and the PhD candidate's study environment, and can affect the other participants. The consequence of this could be that the study is affected in a negative direction, and as the person responsible for research, you understand that I cannot allow that.

On the basis of possible adverse research-related consequences, I conclude as the research manager that you cannot otherwise participate in the study.''
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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.
 
Midnattsol said:
Hasn't Vogt already said at least once it's important to capitialize on the placebo effect?
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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.
 
Peter Trewhitt said:
Always good to see researchers taking the randomised aspect of ‘randomised controlled studies’ seriously (not).
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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.
 
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.

The perfect excuse for failure: Blame the patient for not having the right attitude, before they even try the 'psychoeducation'. Unfalsifiable, unscientific, unethical.

ME/CFS Skeptic said:
Interesting that they state it is 'necessary'. It feels that they are one step away from admitting they are measuring placebo effects.
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Not just any actual placebo effect, but also a whole bunch of methodological biases and confounders that they don't control for and just conveniently lump together to boost the apparent placebo effect.
 
Sean said:
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.

The perfect excuse for failure: Blame the patient for not having the right attitude, before they even try the 'psychoeducation'. Unfalsifiable, unscientific, unethical.
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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?
 
rvallee said:
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.
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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.
 
Peter Trewhitt said:
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.
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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 ?
 
Steinkopf wrote an update yesterday, as Flaten have given a comment:

Update: On 19 September, Flaten answers the question about how common it is in research that it is a condition for participation that one is convinced of a positive result:

"On a general level, it is the case that in all studies with human participants there are certain inclusion and exclusion criteria that must be followed. In addition, there are procedures that the participants must follow. For example, it would not be appropriate to include participants who refuse to take the drug in a drug study. These are excluded.”
 
Midnattsol said:
Steinkopf wrote an update yesterday, as Flaten have given a comment:

Update: On 19 September, Flaten answers the question about how common it is in research that it is a condition for participation that one is convinced of a positive result:

"On a general level, it is the case that in all studies with human participants there are certain inclusion and exclusion criteria that must be followed. In addition, there are procedures that the participants must follow. For example, it would not be appropriate to include participants who refuse to take the drug in a drug study. These are excluded.”
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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?
 
This article may belong in the News from Scandinavia where I have collected a few others in the same series, but it was very relevant here. How to design your study to give a positive result, and I think most will recognize the study design of the LP study ;)

Recipe for study that will give good results
  • Let the study be carried out by researchers who have a lot to gain from good results for the form of treatment being tested. It tends to affect the interpretation of the results.
  • Carry out the treatment in the studies in a way that maximizes the hope and expectation of the participants, not necessarily the way the patients will receive the therapy in reality.
  • Not controlled for the placebo effect! Rather, set up the experiment so that you compare the treatment with something that might make the patients worse. This is how it looks like your treatment is having a great effect.
  • Bring a few participants. This increases the chance of incidental positive findings, even when the treatment does not really have an effect.
  • Measure many possible changes to the treatment. If the method doesn't seem to work on what you were supposed to investigate in the first place, some positive changes may appear on the other targets. And then you can just focus on them, while not talking so much about what didn't work.
  • And should everything still end in negative results, you can always put the study in the drawer, instead of making the bankruptcy public, write Cuijpers and Cristea.
The article also features a short discussion on the problems of wait list controls, with a link to a more in-depth article on the topic :thumbup:

Noe er galt i forskningen på psykologi
Something is wrong in psychology research

This post has been copied to start a new thread on research methodology where the topic can be discussed further: Recipe for study that will give good results
 
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