Isn't there a point at which people working in this field find issue with the fact that it's just the same 2 things being done near identically over and over again? Are they OK with this? Don't realize it? I'm not sure which is worse.
I guess the "innovation" here is the opposite of the recent trend, of making it super obvious that they mean psychosomatic rather than pretending they imply nothing of the sort. Wow. So novel. No one's ever tried "there is no disease, you can aim for 100% recovery" before. Nope. Well, they did, many times, nearly identically, but better do it 100x more times just to be sure. Once while wearing a fake mustache. Once while singing during the CBT. Once more singing with a fake mustache during the CBT. Once with the patient wearing the fake mustache. Once more with the therapist wearing a difference mustache than the patient. And on and on and on.
Because this isn't like the 200+ Alzheimer's drugs that were tested and failed. It's more like trying 200+ with the exact same drug but with differently colored packages or pill form, or maybe some random ritual before taking it, irrelevant differences that change nothing to the fact that it's the same thing stuck in a loop for decades.
Complete waste of funding. I don't get it, it serves absolutely no purpose other than employing people who can't do science, but would otherwise have plenty of work anyway. The cluelessness is just staggering:
They report that they experience a lack of empathy and support, feel stigmatised and not taken seriously, and are worried because neither they nor their physicians understand where the symptoms come from
Literally doing exactly that. Responding to lack of empathy with even more lack of empathy. Brilliant. What is the explanation for being so utterly blind about every damn thing they do?
A Cochrane review assessing the effects of non-pharmacological interventions for MUS concluded that when all psychological therapies included in the review are combined they seem to be superior to usual care or waiting list controls in terms of reduction of symptom severity
"Yes, we've tried them all, but have we tried them all together all at once?!" GENIUS!
The fact that there is an economic analysis says everything about the goals, especially given this approach has already proven to be useless. Not just counting your chickens before they hatch but actually selling the eggs your future chickens may produce, for tomorrow's breakfast.
Look closely and this is largely a copy of PACE, comparing a few treatment arms with no discernible reason. Didn't bother with objective outcomes this time, though, saves them the trouble of having to justify dropping them later on. Primary outcome is a single self-reported questionnaire over perceived limitations, then a bunch of random questionnaires scrambled by mathemagics. Allows everything to be interpreted to whatever conclusion they already reached (you'll never guess which one!).
People involved in the funding and approval of this study are making very poor use of public academic resources.
A strength of our study is that the psychosomatic therapy is a well-accessible intervention already delivered in primary care by physical therapists with special interests in MUS
So the "treatment" is already in common use. Which would imply it should be effective, otherwise it would be insane that it would commonly used. But obviously not, because that's not how BPS rolls, first you deploy despite small-scale failure, then you test and argue that it's been in use for a while so might as well not waste all that sunk cost even when it is clearly useless.
In conclusion, if proven cost-effective, psychosomatic therapy would provide a valuable additional treatment option for adult patients with MUS.
But it's already in common use, you just said that a few paragraphs before, how can it be an additional option? Oh nevermind, nobody expects consistency here.
Weird that none of the references are any of the other identical prior trials. It's groundhog day, every day, amnesia-based evidence.
]
