When the Claim That Psychotherapy Extends the Lives of Cancer Patients Moved From Controversial to Implausible
It was a time of intense intellectual debate, but conversations were warped by strong pressures to conform to a discredited view enforced by punishment meted out for dissenters from bully proponents.
August 2023 Introduction
This was a serious intellectual debate that was occurring not only in social media and at conferences, but in respectable peer review journals. I found that many experts joined the position that my group espoused. Sometimes it was an assessment that they had already made. Yet some experts had been more agnostic until they actually conducted a registered RCT with death as an actual primary outcome and honestly and transparently reported the results.
From the start, our team (my postdoc Steven C. Palmer, Michael E. Stefanek, who was the Vice President of Behavioral Science at the American Cancer Society, and me) did not believe that a debate was necessary.
First, we found no support for the claims made in David Spiegel‘s initial Lancet article. There was no plausible mechanism and no effect that needed to be explained.
Second, we rejected Speigel’s unconventional rules for deciding which studies were relevant, which should be ignored, and how we should synthes…