Introduction

First, I want to welcome all my readers.  One of my current professional missions is to bridge the Scientist-Practitioner gap that currently exists in the mental health field.  John Riolo has written very eloquently about this problem elsewhere on psychjourney.  I became interested in this issue after having been extensively involved with Thought Field Therapy (TFT) for seven years.  See http://www.tftrx.com for more information on TFT.  One year ago I severed my ties with TFT and its Founder because I could no longer stand by the unwarranted claims that were being made.  People can read more about my journey with TFT and subsequent criticisms here:

http://www.geocities.com/health_index/thought_field_therapy.html

My latest news is that the controlled study I did on Thought Field Therapy Voice Technology vs. Random Meridian Sequences has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal, the Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice.  See www.srmhp.org for more information about this journal. The tentative date for publication will be their Spring/Summer 2005 issue.  This study compares a highly expensive proprietary procedure, TFT Voice Technology (VT) with a completely random sham protocol and showed that there were no differences between the two. I decided to do this experiment because TFT's Founder charges people $100,000 to train in this method and clients pay up to $600 per hour for it.  There has never been any solid evidence to support the claims being made for this and this study now falsifies the claims being made about it. The practice has continued and the Founder continues to make the same claims he always has, business as usual.

I have a number of other areas of interest and concern regarding pseudoscientific practices, especially the so-called "attachment" and "holding" therapies (see www.kidscomefirst.info ) and bogus recovered memory techniques and the many myths about trauma and memory, discussed extensively by John Riolo and his guests on his Labyrinth series.

In addition to debunking, I am also very interesting in understanding more about the reasons therapists choose to use these methods in their practices.  It has been my experience that most of these therapists are well-intentioned, but something has been missed in their training that they did not learn about the existing empirically supported methods (or, for some reason choose not to use them). Another question I've been exploring lately is what, if any, differences exist between these clinicians and those who choose to use the scientist-practitioner model.  I'll write more about this and many other topics of interest, in later postings.

Comments

[Dean Hughson]

Good stuff!!!! keep writing.

Dean

[Monica Pignotti]

Whoops. I just realized I made a major error on one of the links I posted (I just corrected it on the original, so it should be fine now). The link I wanted to recommend on "attachment" therapy is http://www.kidscomefirst.info . The link I incorrectly gave, Fightforkids.org is a Scientology sponsored link and not one I wanted to promote at all! At some point, I'll write about Scientology.

[William Scott Scherk]

Great to see you with a blog, Monica.

WSS

[Randy Pennington, PsyD]

Just wanted to commend you Monica for your efforts in combating the pseudoscience that is prevelant in the fringe form of Attachment Therapy (holding therapy/rage reduction therapy/coercive restraint therapies). I, too, have been confronted with many families who are uninformed about the differences between pseudoscience and science. I appreciate what you are doing. Keep up the good work.

Randy Pennington, PsyD
Alpine, Utah