They try to correct me here and I laugh at them, then they call me an uncivilized yank. And by they I mean my Brit partner, but he grew up in NJ so I’m not sure who he is calling uncivilised.
I’m asking you to back yourself with a credible journal. You did not and jumped to anecdote. I’m open to having my mind changed but I want to see actual evidence. This next journal has an impact factor of 2. This is not a great score, especially for medicine. Hell, even Frontiers scores higher. Placebos do work and have utility, by the way, just as the Harvard article I linked said and I’ve repeated over and over. That’s not the issue.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor?wprov=sfla1 This is part of how the scientific conversation works, it’s not perfect but good for generalising and mostly reliable. Things that become mainstream parts of the conversation will get more citations, especially as funding will flow those ways, so a lot of the criticisms smooth over. I’m trying to explain how this all works because it’s complicated and valuable to know and very political. Just because someone published something doesn’t make it infallible. There’s really a range of grey because it is a conversation. Having a good journal backing you carries a lot of weight as they rest their reputation on you, multiplying your voice in a way. I like to picture it like a video game multiplier.
PubMed is a search engine for many journals. It’s not one journal.
When you write a paper, you’re not trying to prove something. You’re trying to attack your hypothesis from all angles and disprove it. You want to be wrong because what’s the fun in knowing everything.
That’s ok. It’s good to question things. I realise this stuff is hard. I added an important caveat to how we approach hypotheses. There is actually a lot of writing about how there is too much information to filter these days, even for academics. This is why we rely on things like impact factor. Additionally, anyone can technically publish in a journal but it is hard to get into because of these kinds of politics.
When you find a paper, Google the name of the journal + “impact factor”, and you should find something. Some journals display their metrics with different scores due to complications with the IF system, so you’ll need to judge those accordingly but they should come up with the same search keywords. There should be a body of literature with higher scores, not just single papers too. Also, look up your authors and see if this is actually something they’re qualified for. This all shows the idea has been established and accepted as part of the mainstream conversation. This is the academic “sniff test.”
The problem with hypnosis isn’t the absence of evidence, it’s the lack of significant effects (efficacy), notably as a standalone treatment. Most sciences measure this with a variant of a p-value. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value?wprov=sfla1 Note that interpretations of p-values are susceptible to placebo effects.
It’s also kind of important that the research is relatively newer because of some metascience trends have changed our understanding of things and we have different standards now.
Efficacy. It needs to pass through this before it gets to effectiveness testing. Meta studies are important for examining this hence the wiki section mention earlier, which lists a bunch.
Note that just being in the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not being cannibalised. Papers or trends may arise that put other researchers in a tizzy. If it’s an accepted practice, you are likely to see a lot of papers fine tuning methods.
The placebo thing shuffles it under their umbrella. There’s a lot of issues there with those.
You generally got it. ;) The grey areas keep things interesting. Methodology is also important to consider and pick apart more and more considerations of appropriate applications and working contexts. It may be that this practice should be re-categorised rhetorically too, e.g. the language that we use to talk about this subject causes too much confusion as this thread exemplifies.
Lots of things have once been seen as mystical woo, but later had some of the phenomena established with good investigations. From what I have seen, and I’m by no means an expert, that body of literature one would expect for this just isn’t there yet.
Ps: Determining a good IF score will depend on the niche-ness and topic as well but that is why you try not to examine literature in a vacuum of one or two papers. Naturally, those that read more on these specific subjects are the best judges.
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