What should be used for baselines against which to compare treatments' effectiveness?

None of the kinds of control groups that are commonly relied on in randomized clinical trials can provide a clinically ethical and meaningful lower baseline against which to demonstrate that any specific form of psychotherapy is worth providing. The outcome of the natural course of a malady is what...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychotherapy research 2009-05, Vol.19 (3), p.358-367
Main Authors: Krause, Merton S., Lutz, Wolfgang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
bona fide treatments
feasible control groups
Humans
lower baselines
lower bound baseline
Mental Disorders - diagnosis
Mental Disorders - psychology
Mental Disorders - therapy
natural course
Psychotherapy - methods
Psychotherapy - standards
Treatment Outcome
upper bound baseline
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:None of the kinds of control groups that are commonly relied on in randomized clinical trials can provide a clinically ethical and meaningful lower baseline against which to demonstrate that any specific form of psychotherapy is worth providing. The outcome of the natural course of a malady is what logically sets the lower bound baseline for how effective a treatment for the malady ought to be, but natural courses of psychological maladies are now generally neither ethically nor feasibly determinable. So it is the available ethically adequate treatments for a psychological malady that properly must define a lower baseline against which to compare new treatments for their effectiveness. Optimal mental health is the obvious upper bound baseline, and so treatments ought to always be also evaluated against it to show how ineffective they are.
ISSN:1050-3307
1468-4381
DOI:10.1080/10503300902926539