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Comment by agronaut | Hacker News Reader

The article goes into that. It's hard to get funding.

Is it, though?

Science isn't always an expensive endeavor. Certainly checking in with clients a few years after and comparing outcomes with a control group could be done with volunteers. Setting up a blind can be done with basic survey tools which are available at low cost.

The expensive parts of this research are getting facilities and people willing to take an untested treatment. But he already has both those, so I really can only attribute the lack of scientific evaluation to a lack of will to do it.

while you are essentially correct, I would imagine that a therapy such as this would be hard to 'own' and profit from after successful development, so the sources of funding may well be quite limited compared to the funding available to develop a new drug therapy.

There's a much higher bar, too, to any form of research that involves human subjects. There's a whole regulatory regime that must be complied with to even get permission to do this kind of research. If the possible downside is high (as it is here... what if the treatment makes the subjects worse and a bunch of them wind up more suicidal than they were before?) the level of required oversight is pretty high.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- unethical and/or misguided researchers have actively harmed their subjects too many times in the past. Nonetheless, it's something that people who haven't done human subjects research often overlook, and something that can add a huge amount of expense and delay.

If you're doing generic CS research* the worst that usually happens is that you have to reboot. We can't reboot people, at least not yet. :-)

*If you're doing research on, say, human computer interaction, you generally do have to get human subjects approval, but not usually for compilers, algorithms, or the like.

Edit: "people willing to take an untested treatment"

That's exactly the rub. The potential subjects for something like this are what's known in the jargon as a "vulnerable group". You have to be very, very sure (and be able to convince a skeptical oversight committee) that your subjects are, in fact, giving their active and informed consent for an experimental treatment. That's quite hard to do for people with severe psychological problems (again, rightly so... some of the abuses of the past make for sobering reading).

But he's already performing the treatment on people. He's already skirting the regulations. Merely collecting data on what he's already doing doesn't make it worse.

Let's be clear here: I don't think outside funding is needed. As I described, this isn't expensive. The cost is small enough that it could be paid for out of his pocket and he'd easily recoup the investment if it proves that his technique works.

I think the reason he hasn't done studies isn't because of lack of funding, it's because scientifically validating his claims isn't a priority.

I don't think a small ad hoc study would be taken seriously. The dynamics here are institutional.

It's not about being taken seriously, it's about finding out whether what he's doing actually helps people.

You don't need institutions to prove your hypothesis, you need evidence.

It might be hard for Van der Kolk specifically to get funding. The article mentions that he's kind of a pariah because he endorsed the "recovered memory" stuff that led to a lot of lawsuits based on very questionable allegations of child abuse. The leading consensus on this phenomenon is that recovered-memory therapy mostly creates the "recovered" memories. See also the Mandela Effect/Berenstein Bears/Shazaam stuff, where people have seemingly done this to each other spontaneously.

You're missing my point: I think that this could be studied cheaply enough that he wouldn't need outside funding.

I'll add that I think the reason he hasn't performed studies on the technique isn't lack of funding, but that validating his claims isn't a priority for him.

His background only makes me believe more firmly that evidence is not a priority for him.

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