Wessely and double-blinding

Sean

Sean

Moderator
Staff member
Posting this from Wessely in a 2009 interview, because it shows that he clearly understands the importance of double-blinding subjective outcome measures and controlling for the placebo effect, and is happy to (selectively) invoke this standard when it suits him to further his psychosocial ideology.

Original article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126997-000-mind-over-body/
Full text: http://www.healthcare-today.co.uk/content.php?contentId=10612

Your recent research is on people who claim that mobile phones make them ill. What’s going on there?
My colleague James Rubin and I showed that people who believe they are sensitive to mobile phones aren’t able to tell the difference between sham and real phone signals.
Click to expand...

"Design: Double blind, randomised,..."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16520326

"...a double-blind, placebo-controlled provocation study."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18940376

@Jonathan Edwards
@dave30th
@Lucibee
 
Last edited:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1440612/

We generated exposures by using the standard GSM handset system used within the UK Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research programme.10 The antenna for this headband mounted system was positioned slightly above and behind the left ear and within a few millimetres of the participant's scalp. Both GSM and continuous wave conditions produced a target specific absorption rate adjacent to the antenna of 1.4 W/kg, with an uncertainty of ±30%. For the sham exposure, a continuous wave signal was generated to ensure that the system heated up to the same degree as the active exposures but was diverted to an internal load instead of being transmitted through the antenna; only minimal leakage of this signal occurred (specific absorption rate < 0.002 W/kg).
Click to expand...

Assuming electrosensitivity is a real thing, the sham exposure may not have been a sham exposure.
 
Did he really say "Unfortunately some people decide to monitor their symptoms and can get trapped in vicious circles..."?

Is anyone researching recidivism?
 
Err... They may have "understood" the reason for blinding, but other aspects of study design...
The rooms, which were lit by two table lamps, were not shielded against outside electromagnetic fields.
Click to expand...

So there is no way they can make this statement from what they did:
We found no evidence to indicate that self reported sensitivity to 900 MHz GSM mobile phone signals has a biological basis.
Click to expand...

Those with self-reported sensitivity are probably responding to something else, but they are clearly responding to something. They can't claim that it doesn't have a biological basis, because they didn't look at that. This is such poor science.
 
This probably reflects his views about 'powerful placebo' - eg: double-blind is important for identifying the cause of symptoms, but questionnaire scores are a reliable measure of symptoms regardless of blinding!

Therefore some sort of faked ritual that gets questionnaires to change shows that the real symptoms are generated by inaccurate cognitions related to the ritual.

Personally, I've found that some people reporting 'electro-sensitivity' problems can claim to be entirely confident about some very strange and implausible views, although others just seem to have difficult symptoms and then fallen into 'electro-sensitivity' explanations as they tried out different things hoping to get better. I guess that if there was real electro-sensitivity then those people would not be discussing it with me on the internet anyway.
 
Thought I might post this here: In 1998 Wessely and colleagues wrote a review on antidepressants where they argue that many trials used inert placebo's so that patients and clinicians could guess which was the intervention and which one wasn't. They argued that such unblinding effects introduced bias that might lead to an overestimation of effect sizes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9614471
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom