There is a study published in the October/November 2011 issue of Integrative Medicine—A Clinician’s Journal comparing two groups of 30 autistic kids, ages 2.5 to 10 years, all in special education classrooms. One group received NAET treatments for a year and the other did not, so it wasn't actually a blind study (it would be hard to fake a treatment.) Both groups were allowed to continue their other therapies.
Twenty-six of the 30 NAET kids completed the year of treatment. Twenty-three of those were able to return to regular school classes with their non-autistic peers after one year of treatment (that's an astounding 88.5% of the once labeled 'autistic' kids being introduced to regular classrooms. You may recall how I wrote of my pediatrician's expereince with NAET, he had 60 of 63 autistic children under going NAET that were being mainstreamed--95%.) Meanwhile all of the 30 children in the untreated control group continued to need special education.
“We found that NAET is an effective, safe and simple treatment for children with allergy-related autism,” said Jacob Teitelbaum, MD, head author. “In human terms, NAET can provide profound and dramatic benefits, giving children with autism and their families their lives back.”
Interesting to see a study published. I know next to nothing about how to conduct a trial, but it seems to me that the authors could have blinded the trial in two ways to make the results more convincing. They could have conducted the NAET assessments in a double-blind fashion; and they could have had one group of clinicians treat the subjects and another group (who did not know which subjects had been treated and which not) analyze how the subjects improved (or not). The authors didn't blind in either way and therefore, because we tend to find what we are looking for, they could have biased the results. I know this from personal experience in the lab.
ReplyDeleteDuring a NAET treatment the patient has an avoidance period, so the patient would have to know what they were treated for in order to avoid the substance, making it impossible to be blinded in that regard. Even if they biased the results, the placement into regular classrooms is astounding; and it would be the special ed program's call on who is ready to leave the program, not the doctors. Just so happended to be almost all of the NAET kids and none of the others.
ReplyDeleteI'd be concerned about a study at least one of whose authors (Nambudripad) has a large financial stake in the outcome. She says there are no competing financial interests but that is not true--any paper that makes claims like this provides the appearance of legitimacy for her technique, and she stands to profit from her books and seminars. Just like one is correct to suspect the results of research on products backed by big pharma, one has trouble accepting any paper by authors who have an interest in the results going one way or the other. A study by a truly independent group would carry more weight.
ReplyDeleteI think it's OK for a financially interested party to do the first study, but we'd like to see a second independent study confirming the results. I vaguely recall that the scientific method usually requires a test to be proven repeatable by others, which is best done by having others repeat the experiment.
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