An audit of 12 cases of long COVID following the lightning process intervention examining benefits and harms, 2025, Arroll

Relevant bits about participants:

The LP practitioner agreed to participate in an independent audit of patients completing treatment and obtained permission to provide the study team with names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers. Our interviewer followed up with participants who were not initially contactable to avoid responder bias. The sample size was determined by the number of participants the interviewer could do during her student vacation.

Of 20 patients completing the LP, 12 (60%) were contactable; all agreed to be interviewed

 

If the samples size was determined by the number of participants they would be able to interview, it suggest that the total pool of participants was larger.

It’s also unclear who the instructor gained permission from, although I guess it was from the participants. If so, it’s weird that only 12/20 were contactable if they already gave permission for the team to get their contact info.

Based on the wording, it’s also not possible to rule out that they asked for 20 names from the instructor, and that the instructor chose 20 from a larger pool.

 

Dunno if this is just empty grumbling, but I am annoyed at the use of contactable. Obviously it was possible to contact everyone, which is the definition of contactable. 12 were contacted, but all 20 were obviously contactable.

I just can't find this an honest mistake, and it is minor, but damn is it just lowering expectations for academics to not expect that they use basic words correctly. It just screams to me of how spammers mangle language on purpose, because anyone annoyed by it would be a poor mark and they'd just lose their time.

 

I believe contactable means to be able to communicate with someone, as opposed to just being able to send them a message of some kind.

Your interpretation makes more sense, but the English language is weird sometimes..

 

I had read this to mean the other 8 (40%) were not contactable, though that doesn’t make sense if it is the case that the researchers only had resources to interview the 12. Perhaps they intended to communicate that all of the 12 they chose to interview were contacted without any problem, but that they knew nothing about the contactability or otherwise of the remaining 8 as they did not attempt to contact them.

Though this begs the question how they selected which 12 to contact. There are so many levels of selection here, either self selection or LP practitioner selection or researcher selection.

• clients selected themselves by being interested in pursuing LP
• LP practitioner selected who to allow into the LP programme
• clients self selected in terms of dropping out or completing the course
• the practitioner selected which clients to approach to pass on to the researchers
• the clients then selected whether or not to agree to this, though the implication is that none of the approached clients opted out at this stage
• the researchers selected who to contact to interview, with an implication that at this stage none of the approached clients declined to be interviewed

There seems limited information about how each of these stages of selection were conducted, which is worrying if, as the authors seem to ultimately claim, these clients are to be taken as representative of Long Covid patients, especially as there was no actual verification of the clients’ Long Covid status in the first place. So even before the research began there were five stages of preselection, with a final selection process by the researchers.