Personality and fatal diseases: Revisiting a scientific scandal, 2019, Pelosi

Thought some here might find this interesting.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1359105318822045

 

When Simon Wessely shoved a Hans Eysenck scandal under the rug

 

From Coyne's blog:

https://jcoynester.wordpress.com/20...-shoved-a-hans-eysenck-scandal-under-the-rug/

No mention of Pelosi in the special edition: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/personality-and-individual-differences/vol/103

Maybe this is that delayed paper, now in the Journal of Health Psychology?

Personality and Individual Differences did find room for Adam Perkins though:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886916307449

Perkins also sees parallels between the criticism of himself and Wessely: https://www.s4me.info/threads/“it-h...e-being-weaponized-article-in-quillette.4476/

Why do these people attract such 'severe' criticism?

 

I'm pretty blown away by this article. The author seems very confident in his judgements about Eysenck, yet does not seem to realise that he is buying into a whole other set of BS right there! Serious questions have been raised about the evidence for personality factors having an influence on cancer survival rates. This stuff is what James Coyne cut his career on:

Positive psychology in cancer care: Bad science, exaggerated claims, and unproven medicine
JC Coyne, H Tennen
Annals of behavioral medicine 39 (1), 16-26

Meta-analysis of stress-related factors in cancer
JC Coyne, AV Ranchor, SC Palmer
Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology 7 (5), 296

Invited commentary: personality as a causal factor in cancer risk and mortality—time to retire a hypothesis?
AV Ranchor, R Sanderman, JC Coyne
American journal of epidemiology 172 (4), 386-388
​

Maybe focusing on Eysenck's bad practices helps these folks divert the focus of attention from themselves?

 

"This work truly does ‘poison the well’ of science (Smith, 2006)."

 

Just to clarify, those excerpts were from Wessely's old piece about Eysenck, criticised on Coyne's blog, not the new Pelosi Eysenck article.

 

Saw that there was an accompanying editorial from David Marks, and an open letter calling for an independent investigation: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1359105318820931

 

There cn be no reason for not having an investigation...….now that he's dead.

 

Lets hope we don't have to wait that long for our bete noire.

 

@Esther12, what an appalling load of

Ah, okay.

 

This reminds me of a documentary on treating cancer I saw in the late 1980's. It may have been the one on interferon that I mentioned in another thread.

There was a middle-aged woman in a hospital bed who had been diagnosed with cancer. In desperation, she was telling her husband that she had heard that her thought patterns could cause cancer. She was trying to convince her husband that maybe psychotherapy could help her. Her husband was patiently trying to explain to her that psychotherapy was not going to do any good at this point, as she had already developed cancer. I'm pretty sure that, by the end of the documentary, it was made plain that her doctors had been unable to save her.

This really stuck in my mind because it was so tragic. I was aware of the idea that thought patterns could cause cancer (for some reason I recall it being attributed to "negativity," instead of "passivity"), but I had no idea of how good (or should I say "how bad") the evidence for this was. Now, of course, the idea that this patient was led to believe that her own thoughts were in some way responsible for her terminal cancer just makes me angry.

 

Interesting twist to this, I was certainly unaware of this connection when I started this thread.
https://twitter.com/user/status/1100333983085273088

https://twitter.com/user/status/1100333986847576064

https://twitter.com/user/status/1100333988017778688

 

That Pelosi review was utterly appalling.

 

Blog from Neuroskeptic about the Pelosi paper, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2019/02/25/cancer-personality-1/

 

For those who can read German and have a bucket handy:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Grossarth-Maticek

 

That about sums it up I think Trish.

Just to clarify this bit for everyone, Coyne is claiming that Pelosi is Reviewer 2 (I think it was), the author of the incredibly childish and unprofessional peer review for the BMJ of the Wilshire et al reanalysis of the PACE trial data.

 

Great summary Trish! Though I think it's a little soft on Eysenck. I think he didn't just add his name to the research but actively promoted it. And the tobacco money seems to be linked directly to him instead of the research. Marks for example writes:

"To his eternal shame, the attempts by Hans Eysenck to discredit the wellestablished causal links between tobacco smoking and cancer while in receipt of large sums from the tobacco industry is one of the most shameful deceits committed by any scientist in the 20th century."​

 

RGM is still plying his trade:

From 1990 to 2006, Grossarth-Maticek was Director of the Institute for Preventive Medicine, Political, Economic and Health Psychology in Heidelberg. He then took over the management of the Heidelberg Center for Multidisciplinary Research (ZMF). Since 2007, he has also been Director of the Intergovernmental Program for Multidisciplinary Studies of the European Center for Peace and Development (ECPD), part of the United Nations Peace Organization in Costa Rica.

The Heidelberg Center for Multidisciplinary Research (ZMF) was founded in 2004. Several institutes of various universities, clinical and research institutions cooperate with the ZMF. The aim of the center is to carry out multidisciplinary analyzes and to develop preventive intervention strategies, taking into account different aspects of life that are closely interlinked (eg family history, personality, professional influences, physical and organic factors, lifestyle, religiosity, social issues, Integration).

The results of the monodisciplinary sciences are creatively and innovatively integrated in a multidisciplinary overall concept.