Tag: CBT

Yet Another Meta-Analysis Purporting to Prove that CBT Is Effective for “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”

I just wrote about how PACE was favorably cited in an article in Nature Reviews Cardiology. Last month, that piece of crap was also included as part of yet another meta-analysis that mushed together the findings from a load of bad papers and concluded that, collectively, they prove something or other. This new paper—“Efficacy and…

January 30, 2024
Yet More Stupidity from the Dutch CBT Fan Club

*This is a crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley for my Trial by Error project. If you appreciate my work and would like to help support it, here’s the link for this November’s campaign. As I pointed out last month when I reviewed a ridiculous study of “psychosomatic therapy” for “persistent somatic symptoms,” the Dutch psychologizers can’t seem…

November 11, 2023
Just the Latest Gibberish from Professor Chalder

I’ve said it before and will undoubtedly say it again. Trudie Chalder, King’s College London’s mathematically and factually challenged professor of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), is a one-trick pony. She writes what is essentially the same bad paper based on the same unfounded assumptions over and over again. Her apparent professional success represents, at least…

September 4, 2023
More on the Perplexing Dutch Claim that Null Results for Objective Measures of Physical Activity Are Irrelevant to Fatigue

I recently wrote about a Dutch study published a few months ago in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases–“Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Targeting Severe Fatigue Following Coronavirus Disease 2019: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial.” The study, nick-named ReCOVer, found that unblinded trials relying on subjective outcomes will produce modestly positive reports in the group receiving…

August 8, 2023
Dutch Team Offers “Dog-Ate-My-Data” Excuses for Not Reporting Null Objective Findings

Two months ago, Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID), a high-impact journal, published a study called “Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Targeting Severe Fatigue Following Coronavirus Disease 2019: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial.” The study, nicknamed ReCOVer amd conducted in the Netherlands, purported to provide the “first evidence for the positive effect of CBT in patients with…

July 11, 2023
Claim that CBT Is Safe Is “Misleading,” Says Dutch Ad Group

In a recent decision, the Advertising Code Foundation in the Netherlands has criticized as “misleading” a statement on the website of the Knowledge Center for Chronic Fatigue (NKCV) touting its treatment approach as “not harmful.” The decision is something of a slap at the NKCV and its co-leader, Professor Hans Knoop, a psychologist and a…

June 8, 2023
Dutch CBT Study for Long Covid Proves that Unblinded Studies with Subjective Outcomes Generate Positive Reports

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about a problematic Dutch study that had been funded by a major health agency and was being led by Hans Knoop, a professor of medical psychology at Amsterdam University Medical Centers. The study sought to test whether a course of cognitive behavior therapy starting months after a…

May 25, 2023
German Draft Report on ME/CFS Raises Alarms for Promoting CBT and GET

The European ME Coalition (EMEC) has published a statement about and an analysis of a recently released report about ME/CFS from a Germany agency, the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG). With EMEC’s permission, I have re-posted the statement in full below. The original post can be found here. The in-depth analysis,…

October 28, 2022
Research From GET/CBT Ideological Brigades Shows No Improvements in Work Status

Last year, Mark Vink, a Dutch physician with ME/CFS, and Friso Vink-Niese, an independent researcher, published a review of occupational outcomes among ME/CFS patients after treatment with either graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). The results were not pretty. When viewed specifically through the perspective of employment status, the treatments bombed. This…

September 30, 2022
More on the Dutch CBT Long Covid Trial; Finnish Study of “Amygdala Retraining” Program

Update: I have sent the following letter to the responsible person listed on the clinical trial registration for the Finnish study of “amygdala and insula retraining”: Dear Dr Lira– I am a public health researcher and journalist with the Center for Global Public Health, part of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. I frequently comment on research in…

February 4, 2022
Dutch CBT Trial Targets “Dysfunctional Beliefs About Fatigue” in Long Covid Patients

Since the emergence of the phenomenon now called long Covid (or Long COVID, depending on news organization), skeptics have been out in full force. Even as huge numbers of people experience a range of sequelae after a bout of Covid-19, some experts maintain that common non-specific symptoms, like cognitive impairment and relapses of profound exhaustion,…

January 7, 2022
CBT Model of Medically Unexplained Symptoms, Explained; CBT Trial for Q-Fever Fatigue

As I have recently written, four major clinical trials of CBT for so-called MUS have documented the opposite of what the investigators hoped to prove. In fact, the evidence from this research suggests that CBT is not an effective treatment for these conditions. That hasn’t stopped these investigators from claiming otherwise, of course. As my…

July 21, 2021