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For decades, post-viral physical symptoms have been trivialized as psychological. Based on shaky empirical grounds, people have been left with CBT as their only treatment option. Now it is COVID19 long haulers’ time to be told “it’s all in their heads.” #LongCovid #covid1in20 1/
Many of those infected by COVID19 don’t fully recover and physicians call for research into the causes, which we currently know very little about. However, some psychotherapists have already attributed it to long haulers being “more prone to distress” http://shorturl.at/wLSYZ 2/
The solution? Cognitive Behavioral Therapy! Don’t get me wrong. As a psychologist, I have no doubt that many people (ill and not ill) can profit from CBT. But it’s stunning that some already assume it can cure medical conditions that we still know very little about. 3/
Many CBT studies with people suffering from post-viral symptoms lack strict blinding and proper control groups - flaws that tend to inflate the chances of false positives. Still, the studies often fail to observe change on objective outcomes. See e.g. http://shorturl.at/efxH8 4/
But we all know that this can be “fixed” right? Primary objective outcomes can be quietly swapped with subjective secondary outcomes before results are published. Inclusion criteria can be altered post-hoc. 5/
Studies producing no significant findings can be renamed from “full-scale trial” to “feasibility study.” In abstracts, one can summarize only the “positive” findings, thereby giving the overall impression of a more or less successful intervention. See http://www.virology.ws 6/
A lot of this reminds me of the questionable research practices that have caused large damage to psychological research. Now it may cause damage to COVID19 long haulers by promoting a speculative biopsychosocial disease model that undermines the search for medical causes. 7/
