Perhaps quality indicators should register if every cancer patient gets a chance for an unhurried discussion about their unmet needs, but not necessarily with a busy, overcommitted oncologist or oncology nurse specialist.
An African physician changed an effective perinatal HIV prevention program into an ineffective one based on misleading abstracts obtained from the Internet.
Would you hesitate to ask for full control of cancer pain in a loved one with medication based on recommendations that psychosocial (nonpharmacological) interventions were effective?
All of the studies were conducted by advocates of long-term psychodynamic therapy and that makes all the more surprising the uniformity of the negative results. After all, investigator allegiance is typically a stronger predictor of the outcome of a clinical trial evaluating a psychotherapy than the therapy being evaluated.
Millions of dollars became available from federal, state, and local sources for mental health services and wild claims about widespread posttraumatic stress helped keep the money coming.
Given the mental health risk they were supposedly facing, should people have turned off their televisions off on 9/11/2001, and immediately gone to see a professional?
Best evidence shows it is a myth that the events of 9/11/2001 inflicted a collective psychological trauma on the American people with long-lasting effects.
"Jim is a tough critic. He circled my herd of ideas like a wolf and picked off the weaker ones. You know, sometimes that kind of thing strengthens the health of the remaining herd."
By publicly disclosing her borderline personality disorder, Dr. Linehan was keeping with a well-established tradition in Western culture of the wounded healer.
Another hijacking of social science data by the religious right to promote abstinence. If people act morally only because they are lied to, is it still moral behavior.
This blog is intended to encourage a healthy skeptical attitude toward the behavioral sciences literature and media coverage of it. It will provide critiques of specific studies and claims but also give readers a set of tools with which they can independently evaluate claims and be alert to hype and hokum. By confronting the journals and the media with better armed and more sophisticated readers, the blog is intended to improve the quality of the information available about research in the behavioral sciences.
Claims that are too good to be true probably are not true.