Concerning study says psychotherapy research has a problem with undeclared researcher bias

By Alex Fradera When a good doctor encounters research comparing the effectiveness of drugs A and B, she knows to beware the fact that B was created by the people paying the researchers’ salaries. Pharmaceutical industry funding can be complex, but the general principle of declaring financial conflicts of interest is now embedded in medical research culture. Unfortunately, research into psychological therapies doesn’t yet seem to have got its house in order in an equivalent way. That’s according to a new open access article in the journal BMJ Open which suggests that, while there is less risk in this field of financially-based conflicts, researchers may be particularly vulnerable to non-financial biases, a problem that hasn’t been adequately acknowledged until now. The research team, led by Klaus Lieb of the University of Mainz, examined 95 systematic and meta-analytic reviews that had evaluated the efficacy of psychological therapies by looking at the weight of evidence across multiple randomised controlled trials. Such reviews are generally used to give a balanced picture of what really works, above and beyond a single trial. The journals that publish this kind of research tend to be on the look out for financial conflicts of interest that could lead to a bias: for example, if the author of a meta-analysis of Therapy X was a license-holder for that therapy but chose not to declare that interest when reviewing it. Indeed, Lieb and his team found that four out of ev...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Methods Therapy Source Type: blogs