Misleading Systematic Review of Mindfulness Studies Was Used to Promote the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine
Alerting readers why they should be skeptical of what they are told about the benefits of mindfulness by an author who has multiple retractions for undeclared conflicts of interest.
August 25, 2023 Introduction
This Substack article brings back to life an earlier PLOS blog Mind the Brain post that was out of circulation because of damage to the repository where my blog posts are archived.
Reproduced below this new introduction, the original blog warns readers to be skeptical of extravagent claims abut the benefits of mindfullness interventions for a wide range of mental and physical health conditions. The claims were made in an overview review published in PLOS One. I noted that the authors were affiliated with the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine, and I suggested that the institute would benefit from glowing picture of the effectiveness of the services and trainings that it marketed.
Retraction Watch deemed the retraction as one of the ten most important retraction events of 2019, noting that I had already gotten Expressions of Concern warning labels attached to five other articles in PLOS One with an overlap in authors.