Joanna Schroeder questions the media’s love of a tantalizing headline
Ahh, the allure of the tantalizing headline. I wonder if the Norwegian researchers who went back to the 1960s and 70s to study whether LSD use can help treat alcoholism thought to themselves, People are gonna eat this shit up! when they went into the research archives, because this new look into old research is definitely causing headlines.
NPR.org reports:
Their rigorous analysis, combining data from six different studies, concludes that one dose of the hallucinogenic drug might just help.
The past studies randomly assigned patients to get a strong dose of LSD or something else (another drug, such as amphetamine, a low dose of LSD or nothing special). And the results provide evidence for a beneficial effect on abstinence from alcohol.
But hold on just a moment… ABC News describes the study like this:
Teri Krebs and Pal-Orjan Johansen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology looked back at studies from the 1960s and 1970s and identified six studies with 536 participants that examined the effect LSD had on alcoholism.
536 participants? Am I the only one who finds that to be a bit flimsy? Though I guess it’s sorta risky to test people with an illegal substance… Researchers aren’t exactly able to dose 5,000 people in multiple studies and create a real meta-analysis of the data on the effects of trippin’ balls.
Sound research or not, LSD to treat Alcoholism is definitely something fun to bring up at your next cocktail party.
Would you trade booze for LSD?
Photo courtesy of ssoosay
About Joanna Schroeder
It didn’t work for me. Crack however, is a good cure for alcoholism, after a while you forget about booze, and have nothing to spare to pay for it.
….Hell yes! Alcohol has it’s place and it’s time in life, but for most people that seems to be a ‘constantly’ sort of basis….¬.¬
Joanna, you actually don’t need quite as many study participants as you might think. More important is getting a representative sample of the population you are studying. Sample bias is far more important than sample size.
Did you read the study, Joanna, or just the media reports about the study? It’s open access, so there is no reason not to have read it.
If you had, you may note that the researchers found 4275 subject records from LSD trials, but narrowed the pool to 536 through their rejection of any studies that do not meet the more rigorous standards of current research. Exclusion of the other studies does not mean they were not useful or effective, only that the study design did not meet current standards (placebo controlled, double blind, etc.).
It’s also important to note that these studies were done in the period from 1966-1970. One of the leaders in that era of research was Stanislav Grof (see Grof, et al; JAMA, 1970;212(11):1856-1863), who conducted many years (beginning in the 1950s) of LSD-based research for alcoholism, narcotic addictions, and neurosis (in the old psychoanalytic sense of the word, suggesting highly rigid defense mechanisms). He created very detailed protocols for using LSD in psychotherapy, as well as how the subjects experience on the drug impact outcomes, none of which were employed in the studies included in this meta-analysis.
One is left wondering after reading the study that you dismiss as “a bit flimsy” if the outcomes would be different, i.e., more effective, if the Grof protocols were used along with more intensive therapeutic work during the sessions, and more active follow-up to integrate the insights gained while on the drug. Perhaps results could be better still if the treatment model included a mindfulness based recovery approach in the pre-drug period and in the post-drug integration period.
We are now in a place of being able to offer an integrated and integral model for these issues, but only if people are open-minded enough to look beyond their own limited paradigms. A treatment model that includes body (which can include drugs such as LSD or the shorter acting psilocybin, or yoga, tai chi, etc), psyche (mind, emotions, and spirituality), community (family and friends), and environment will likely produce much better outcomes than any one approach in isolation.
If you are going to report on science, please be responsible rather than going for the easy response (and headline) that may lure readers to the blog but offers them nothing of value once they arrive. Snark is entertaining, but knowledgeable information keeps people coming back for more.
William, I agree with you about teasing about science, I should take it more seriously.
But I don’t report about science, I report about the media. I was actually talking about the articles that were talking about the study… Note the first line, “all the allure of a tantalizing headline” and then made a joke about the researchers thinking about the ability of the study to sell a story. Obviously I don’t think they were thinking that! And I’m making fun of myself for the headline and the obvious spin technique to grab readers… That’s the joke.
If I were writing a feature piece about LSD treating alcoholism, I would 100% have gone in and done a TON of research, as I do about my field of study, which is gender and sex politics.
As far as making a joke about 500 participants, that’s why guys like Nick come and explain that sometimes 500 is the right number if the studies are done accurately. I agree with him about that, and I’m glad to hear that they ruled out so many studies for not being controlled correctly.
That’s why it’s a community! The blog is more about discussion of media than about exploring the issues of science and medicine. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that about the number of participants, but I was really more commenting on how the media will grab a headline and run with any little bit of inflammatory news it can come up with.