An open trial of biofeedback for long COVID, 2024, Emerson et al.

An open trial of biofeedback for long COVID
Emerson; Lavretsky; Pittman; Viswanathan; Siddarth

OBJECTIVES
Biofeedback is a therapeutic treatment model that teaches self-regulation of autonomic functions to alleviate stress-related symptoms. “Long COVID” refers to chronic physical and cognitive sequelae post-SARSCoV-2 infection. This study examined the efficacy of a six-week intervention, consisting of weekly one-hour sessions combining heart rate variability and temperature biofeedback, for alleviating mood symptoms, somatic symptoms and sleep disturbance of patients diagnosed with long COVID.

METHODS
Data were collected from 20 adult participants aged 22–63 (M age = 44.1, SD age = 12.2) with varying long COVID symptoms. Within this single arm design, 16 of the 20 participants completed all six sessions of biofeedback; 14 completed an assessment at the three-month post-treatment time point.

RESULTS
Participants self-reported significant improvements in somatic, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, sleep quality, quality of life, and number of “bad days” immediately after the intervention and three months later (Cohen’s d effect size (ES) = 1.09–0.46). Reduced number of medical doctor visits (ES = 0.85) and prescription drug use over the last month (odds ratio = 0.33), as well as improved emotional wellbeing (ES = 0.97) were observed at the three-month time point only.

CONCLUSIONS
Results suggest that this short, readily scalable intervention can be potentially efficacious in alleviating symptoms of long COVID. Despite notable improvements, the major limitation of this study is its lack of control group. While a randomized trial merits study, biofeedback appears to be a brief, effective, non-invasive, and low-cost treatment option for patients with chronic somatic symptoms secondary to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Link | Paywalled (Journal of Psychosomatic Research)

 

Unblinded, uncontrolled, mostly subjective outcomes. Some secondary outcomes (eg number of missed work days, on disability) were objective but were not significantly different after the intervention.

 

This is the sort of research where if you replaced their fancy biofeedback treatment with watching cartoons, you'd likely get the same results.

 

You could easily get those results with a spooning pillow. Or maybe giving them a spa bath at home that they can use whenever they want.

It's obvious that the field is unwilling to address is validity crisis. They love the fake results too much. They want them to be true so bad that they are willing to trash the credibility of their entire profession. And they still want more.

In the end it's the same old: if you encourage people to report fewer problems, they will. But if you care about there actually being fewer problems, you should care that it's an invalid way of doing this. Hence, they clearly don't care that it's all fake. Awful. We are truly in the golden age of medical pseudoscience, there has never more of it, and it has never been more popular and influential.