RESEARCHThe Placebo Arm Is Not Neutral: Who Leaves, and Why, Across Nine Psychiatric Diagnoses
What goes wrong in a placebo arm is usually not a side effect but time spent not getting better, and how expensive that time is depends on the diagnosis.
RESEARCHThe control app was never empty: what 32 anxiety trials measured when they measured digital placebo
The digital placebo effect reported here is a within-arm change in the control group, which means expectancy is one of several processes packed into a single number.
RESEARCHThe two items that inflate every social-media addiction score
A high total on a social-media addiction scale tells you how much of the scale a young person endorsed, not which part of it, and only one part of it travels with depression and anxiety.
RESEARCHThe most burnt-out residents were the lightest users, not the heaviest
A doctor too depleted to open an app is not a low-risk doctor; in this sample she is the one with the worst depression, anxiety and insomnia scores of anyone.
RESEARCHThe Questionnaire the Spine Clinic Skips: Catastrophising and Six-Month Outcomes in Cervical Disc Herniation
A thirteen-item questionnaire, filled in before the procedure, separated a group in which nine of ten patients ended up satisfied from one in which fewer than half did.
RESEARCHEveryone Improved, Not Equally: A Year of New-Onset Rheumatoid Arthritis
A pain-quality score taken on the day of diagnosis carried prognostic information that a year of inflammatory markers did not.
RESEARCHProlonged Grief in the Scanner: When Salience and the Default Mode Run Too Close
Within each grief group, the tighter the salience and default mode pair ran, the more severe the grief and the more the person avoided – and avoidance is precisely the part of grief a patient will argue is incidental.
RESEARCHWhere the Threshold Sits: Prolonged Grief in Kenya, Namibia and South Africa
A prevalence figure for prolonged grief describes the scoring rule at least as much as it describes the population it was measured in.
RESEARCHThe Alliance Predicts Who, Not When: Multilevel Evidence from China
The alliance predicts who improves more than it predicts when – and in this study that held equally in China and the United States.