Friday 1 March 2013

Researching talking therapies and homeopathy (2)

Researching talking therapies and homeopathy (2)

Some further thoughts. A few years ago Professor John McLeod (probably the leading British counselling academic) told me how he had been thinking of putting together a Randomised Controlled Trial around comparing person-centred counselling with CBT. He had decided not to for these reasons:
1) If his research found that CBT was better his name wold be mud in the person centred world
2) If his research found that person centred was better then CBT people would accuse him of doing a biased study
3) He expected anyway that the likely outcome would be that they were both equally good so why bother.
The issue of both who does the research and who funds it is crucial. It would be so much better if the drug companies who fund most medical research handed their money over to say the Medical Research Council or some other independent body that then oversaw the work and made the results public in open access journals. Likewise any research funded by talking therapy bodies such as BACP needs a similar arms length approach. I believe talking therapies need to be researched by sociologists and anthropologists.
With regard to homeopathy it gets harder but the same independence is important and ideally a research team with a broad background would be established to agree protocols etc. Just because someone claims to be objective it does not mean their research is not biased. Just as the whole medical research agenda is distorted by funding largely coming from drug companies and their agenda. If we really want to do basic research into homeopathy we might well need to think outside of the box to shape the research.