Re:Training Survey - Lipke

First, your comment responding to the content of my psychic example obfuscates the point I was trying to make with the example: That there is a self-selection bias in terms of who choses to attend a particular event. There is also another self-selection bias in terms of who completes the questionnaire. I chose the psychic example to be entertaining, but the example is not important. Rather, the concept of self-selection bias is. Just to give people some sense of how self-selected this sample was: Lipke sent out 1,295 surveys, and got back a total of 443, which is just around 34%.

Now, regarding the comparison in this survey of EMDR with exposure therapy, only 91 of the 443 therapists (about 21%) answered the questions about exposure therapy. In addition, only 68 of the therapists were members of AABT (15%). Only 28 of the therapists (6%) were affiliated with a university.
None of this convinces me that the survey reflects a lot of people with a CBT orientation.

As an aside, it would have been interesting had Likpe sampled other therapies as well, intentionally asking about a range from mainstream kinds of interventions (anxiety management, cognitive therapy, supportive therapy) all the way through really flaky stuff, like rebirthing therapy, various "Power Therapies", Neurolinguistic programming, etc, and everything in-bewtween (psychoanalysis, Jungian analysis, biofeedback, etc.). This kind of information would really have helped us to understand who it was that attended these sessions.

Now, regarding your comment about Shapiro's dissmenition being a huge service to the field, I simply disagree. Even though history tells us that EMDR works, I think she was in error to go out and essentially make it her life's work to train people in EMDR well ahead of the science. What do I mean by this? I would say that the first piece of solid research supporting the efficacy of EMDR was the S. Wilson study that was published in 1995. The next solid piece of research was Rothbaum's study, published in 1997. All of the studies prior to these two either were methodologically flawed (e.g., Shapiro, 1989; Silver, Brooks, & Obenchain, 1995) or the results did not provide convincing evidence of EMDR's efficacy. Yet, in a letter published in the summer 1993 issue of the Behavior Therapist, Shapiro claims to have already trained 4,000 therapists. The dust jacket from the first edition of her book, published in 1995, the same year of publication as the first solid piece of research, claims the figure to be over 10,000 clinicians trained. Talk about getting ahead of the research. Just think if the research had turned out different. How would you justify having trained over 10,000 therapists in a technique that didn't work? Perhaps people who were early supporters of EMDR view the research as a kind of vindication. For myself, however, I would like to see science play a greater role in shaping clinical practice rather than market forces (i.e., supply and demand, successful packaging, etc.).

I will admint that Shapiro has definitely shown us that a therapy can be marketed.

Replies:

marketing emdr, by leah c, 10/31/02 Re:marketing emdr, by Cahill, 11/03/02 Re:marketing emdr, by leah c, 11/04/02

| Behavior OnLine Home Page | Disclaimer |

Copyright © 1996-2004 Behavior OnLine, Inc. All rights reserved.