Outpatient CBT for Motor Functional Neurological Disorder and Other Neuropsychiatric Conditions: A Retrospective Case Comparison (2019) O’Connell

Nicola O’Connell, M.Sc., Ph.D.,Gillian Watson, B.N., P.G.Dip.CBT,Clare Grey, M.Sc., P.G.Dip.CBT,
Rosa Pastena, D.Clin.Psych.,Kenneth McKeown, B.Sc.

https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.neuropsych.19030067?journalCode=jnp



"This study provides evidence that CBT is feasible and effective for some patients with mFND."
suspect that this will be another instance where the evidence is weak and improvement minimal.
eta: scihub http://sci-hub.tw/https://neuro.psy...1176/appi.neuropsych.19030067?journalCode=jnp

 

That seems to be equally consistent with the positive effect being merely due to bias (expectation that the treatment will work or could work).

 

scihub link now in OP

their explanation

they do always seem to have an answer to everything.

 

That's an automatic fail then idiots.

 

Expectation isn't the only factor driving biased responses.

 

This sentence could be rewritten this way and not lose any meaning or value:

A logistic regression analysis found only a single predictor of symptom improvement in the astrology group: acceptance of an astrological explanation of symptoms prior to treatment.​

Obviously people who believe in astrology will report more benefits from... is there such a thing as astrological treatments? I guess the LP somehow counts.

Anyway, this shows how utterly useless this is. Substitute for scientology, homeopathy, healing crystals or anything else and you'd get the same outcome. Hell, a huge number of people are drinking their aged urine and reporting... things, of some kind.

With the rise of woo all over medicine, I think there should be strong considerations to adding quack treatment controls in addition to placebo controls. So compare the active treatment with no treatment and an unambiguous make-believe treatment. I absolutely do not trust the people promoting this nonsense to do honest comparisons, they would likely sabotage the quack treatments the same way PACE sabotaged pacing, but over time I think a clear picture would emerge and things like CBT would actually underperform compared to most other quack pseudoscience.

 

Expectations. Researcher bias in psychosomatics is essentially maximized and influences all decisions, including which questionnaires are more likely to give what answers, as well as in cherry-picking and selective reporting.

Researcher bias is often what will lead to leverage and maximize participant bias, something that is now normalized because of trials like PACE that directly and explicitly tried to influence the outcome by creating expectations in the participants, then performing data analysis based on the researchers' expectations (and that of their sponsors, of course).

Looking more and more like we are in the age placebo, bias is now of no concern, in fact it is encouraged specifically to achieve outcomes and the scientific method is for suckers.