On Sat, 21 Feb 2004, Hari Kumar wrote:
> The bottom line was - that I think that an RCT could have been done.
> There might be some reasons why it never was done. Apart from the fact
> that the medical community (unlike agricultural scientists who did RCT's
> much more frequently & earlier) there is the matter of VESTED INTERESTS.
> Whose? Well, perhaps the billers?
>
It's interesting to me how every field has to create is own jargon to label the same thing. In many scientific disciplines, what the epidemiologists call "RCT" is simply an experiment. --Have researchers conducted experiments (or RCTs) on talk therapies like psychoanalysis? Yes. Are these therapies effective, as measured by various assessment techniques for a variety of negative psychological symptoms? Yes. Could it be a "Hawthorne effect"/ placebo effect? No. Clients in a "placebo" therapy experimental condition (no specified therapy is used by the clinician, but the naive client believes they are receiving some kind of talk therapy) improve less than clients in the talk therapy experimental conditions.
Miles