This is a very common rebuttal that has the potential to ensure we remain in the dark ages I am sad to say Laurence.

The history of medicine is filled with treatments that have worked effectively for millions of people. For example, as cited in a wonderful historical academic paper by Honigfeld (1964), did you know that crocodile dung was used as a contraceptive? It worked according to history, it was effective. If all we care about is “does it work?” then why don’t we all just keep on using crocodile dung as a contraception solution?

For many of us seeking to advance the fields that we work in, it is important that we do not just continue to have a mindset of “as long as it works”, “does it matter how or why?”, “I have success, I don’t need to know any more than that….” That kind of anti-intellectualism (common in this field) would have the crocodiles laughing at us for using their dung for contraception!!!

In many cases, it is expectation, extra therapeutic factors and nothing to do with the therapy being done that actually creates the effect – this is potentially the case with any therapeutic technique strategy used within psychotherapy fields that have not been rigourously tested – it is perhaps the confidence and belief generated by the technique or the way it is delivered or marketed that creates the effect, and not the technique itself.

Many argue that it does not matter as long as we get the result – these are the same people who’d have us applying leeches to ourselves using crocodile dung, bloodletting and so on…… it is a poor argument and holds our progress back. If we want to actually understand the mechanisms that create the change and derive the benefits, we do need to examine and robustly scrutinise what we do, and that often means applying science.

Best wishes, thanks for contributing your thoughts, Adam.

Thanks for this Jim, is there a reference for this somewhere? An article or official BPS announcement? I’d love to read more. Many thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, best wishes, Adam.

Hi Tom, it would be a test, but not necessarily a very expansive one.
Ideally, you want to limit the variables that are being tested so that just one can be isolated to see if that is actively contributing to the outcome. It is all well and good discovering that one approach seems to be more effective than others – but we’d not really know why it was more effective and neither would we know what the mechanism was that was making it more effective.
You’d probably benefit from exploring psychological research methods and scientific procedure in the first instance. Then you’d want to offer up a null hypothesis and design your experiment accordingly and from there. Good luck with it, best wishes to you, Adam.

So say if I have I record a hypnotic induction for helping people with chronic pain, and you do the same, we could test ours on a group of people who suffer from chronic pain, some would get my recording, some yours and some just a relaxing recording of background music. We could then see who gets the best results based on their subjective score of pain, before and afterwards. Would that be a valid test?

In order to do that we’d need some people to test it on, which I guess would take time and money, although not a huge amount.

My pleasure Tejashvi, best wishes to you, Adam.

Thank you Yonatan, I have replied to your email messages and hope I’ve answered your questions there.

Best wishes to you, Adam.

Thank you so much for this interesting piece. I was about to sign up for an NLP course tomorrow when I found your amazing article.

I am all for scientifically proven methods and am now thinking what can I do instead?
unfortunately, I will not start a 1st and 2nd degree in psychology.

I’m very interested in the fields of: influencing people, understanding how to read them, connecting to them, and also helping them be better or overcome fears.

I would love to hear what kind of methods or courses you think would be best for me to take in order to achieve this knowledge (that I originally thought I will with NLP studies).

Thanks!
Yonatan