Eysenck on Cancer blog by Tomasz Witkowski and Maciej Zatonsk Jan 31, 2020

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-...-26-articles-by-legendary-hans-eysenck-shows/

This is quite long, and I haven't managed to read all of it yet. But even the bit I've read makes some interesting points!

I'm finding this article heavy going (been trying to finish reading it for 3 days now - but lack of sleep may have something to do with that), but it seems indicative to me how Psychology cheats.

 

Oh, this looks so interesting, and I could only manage two minutes!

 

Sometimes those prominent scholars are the self-appointed gurus making extraordinary claims. Those same experts are also "thought leaders" in mental health, which frankly makes it very likely that most of mental health research is so flawed as to be entirely meaningless.

The exact same reaction as we see here will inevitably happen for much of the BPS/FND/psychosomatic crap. The foundation is also the same: extraordinary claims with no evidence. Just a thought but maybe we shouldn't be doing that anymore, it literally never works.

Also important: the "experts" can't tell the difference when it comes to illness and the role psychology plays. They even sometimes promote blatant pseudoscience. That is the literal reason why we developed the scientific method, because even the smartest scientists can lie to themselves, sometimes unwittingly and for their whole career.

I often wondered what happened to the "scientists" who published the research denying the link between smoking and cancer. Turns out one of them became the 3rd most-cited academic of all time. Maybe people who deliberately contribute to massive public health crises should have consequences. Just a thought.

Familiar tripe. Literally the same stuff our BPS researchers are saying about us. Literally the exact same tripe found in PACE and in the recent Chalder IBS/IBD iCBT paper.

Those are literally some of the core principles behind the MUS movement all its various acronyms. LITERALLY. I'm so sick of this nonsense.

One important point: if this happened today it would unfold exactly the same way because the field of clinical psychology is essentially still operating with the same beliefs and assumptions. Which should be sobering. Here is a massive failure being looked as a failure in hindsight while nearly identical stuff is hailed as extraordinary claims despite lacking any evidence.

Always follow the money.

Oh, we know. Trust me, we know all about this but nobody listens to us.

 

I decided to leave a comment pointing out to the people who think they would do any better today that they are, in fact, doing the exact same mistake:

 

Do we have a source for that statement? It is extremely powerful.

Sorry, if it's in the article, too much for me to read just now.

 

Which part? About being the 3rd most cited academic?

If you mean the whole sentence it's just me.

 

just so you know, although we all understand and use BPS to mean biopsychosocial, most in medical circles, in the UK anyway would equate it with the British Psychological Society.

 

Ah. I'd read it as him being the third most cited in relation to that specific topic of cancer and smoking, which would have been quite, even for him