From reader Anon:

Somatopsychic versus Psychosomatic--The First The Body is Causing the Problem, the Second is Brought on by the Mind

From the article:

In February of this year, a critical review in the Journal of Health Psychology prompted one of its editors to publish open letters calling for a formal investigation of one of the most influential and heavily cited psychologists of all time, the oft controversial Hans Eysenck.

Recently, Retraction Watch managed to lay hands on the report of such a formal investigation carried out in May by Eysenck’s long-time employer, King’s College London.

Taken together, these documents point to what Anthony Pelosi, a psychiatrist with the UK’s National Health Service in Glasgow and Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow, calls “one of the worst scientific scandals of all time.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Despite the fact that this theory fitted neatly with the purposes of the tobacco industry, at least one in-house scientist of the industry was deeply distrustful of both the man and his ideas, cautioning the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company to have nothing to do with him.

This lone voice was ignored however, and the Association of Cigarette Industries of Germany began funding Grossath-Maticek. In time, even they became sceptical, realising that his data was “fudged” and that he may well be a “charlatan”.

Grossath-Maticek’s association with the older and revered Eysenck was fortuitous on this front, as the latter managed to secure further funding from the tobacco companies to continue pursuing the research on the relationship between personality and ill health.

The research moved, according to Pelosi, away from Grossath-Maticek’s rationality/antiemotionality measures to a typology of personality comprising four distinct personality types, clearly influenced by Eysenck: a cancer-prone personality, a heart disease-prone personality, a mixture personality and a healthy personality.

“This collaboration,” writes Pelosi, “led to what must be the most astonishing series of findings ever to be published in the scientific literature.”

One study using data from Grossath-Maticek’s Yugoslav cohort and from more recent research conducted on patients from Heidelberg, indicated “38.5% of the cancer-prone subjects died of cancer compared with only 0.3% of those with the healthy personality,” a result that accords the cancer-prone personality type a relative risk that Pelosi describes as “perhaps the highest ever identified in non-infectious disease epidemiology.”

Another study on the efficacy of psychotherapy in preventing cancer showed 100% of treated subjects did not die of cancer in the following 13 years, compared to 32% of an untreated control group.

Perhaps most alarming results were connected to Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek’s notion of ‘bibliotherapy’ which consisted of, as Eysenck put it, “a written pamphlet outlining the principles of behaviour therapy as applied to better, more autonomous living, and avoidance of stress.”

This was coupled with five hours of discussion, aimed both at reorienting a patient’s personality away from the cancer-prone and toward a healthier disposition. The results of this study, according to Pelosi, were that “128 of the 600 (21%) controls died of cancer over 13 years compared with 27 of 600 (4.5%) treated subjects.

"Such results are otherwise unheard of in the entire history of medical science.” There were similarly spectacular results concerning various forms of heart disease too.

These decidedly improbable findings led to a blizzard of critical scrutiny through the 90s: Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek’s work was attacked for its methodology, statistical treatment and ethics.

~~~~~~~

“A full and thorough investigation,” he wrote, “would be good for science, for the research integrity of your esteemed institution and for the welfare of patients and the general public.” Staggeringly, he called for “the retraction or correction of 61 publications including more than 40 journal articles, 10 book chapters and 2 books, each in 3 editions.”

According to Retraction Watch, Pelosi’s forensic review and Marks’ eloquent plea have borne fruit, though perhaps not quite as fully as hoped.

Kings College London undertook a formal internal investigation of publications by Eysenck with Grossarth-Maticek, limiting itself to publications by employees of the then Institute of Psychiatry, which includes Eysenck but not Grossarth-Maticek, who, despite his claiming the affiliation repeatedly, was never actually an employee of the Institute.

Their conclusion, published in May, is stark:

“We have come to the conclusion that we consider the published results of studies that included the results of the analyses of data collected as part of the intervention or observational studies to be unsafe and that the editors of the journals should be informed of our decision. We have highlighted 26 papers … which were published in 11 journals which are still in existence.”

Exactly what ‘unsafe’ means in the context is unclear, but it is obvious that this does not bode well for Eysenck’s legacy, despite Kings College London only flagging 26 articles for possible retraction or correction, rather than the 61 noted by Marks. As James Heathers, an investigator of scientific misconduct, writes for Retraction Watch:

“If these papers were retracted, it would vault Eysenck – more than a decade after his death – onto the Retraction Watch leaderboard, tied for 22nd. If the full body of 61 documents was retracted, Eysenck would eclipse Diederik Stapel (58) as the most retracted psychologist in history, a scarcely believable legacy for someone who was at one time the most cited psychologist on the planet.”

Perhaps now we will see the 11 journals that have been contacted by Kings College London take some action to undo the dangerous legacy left by Eysenck and Grossarth-Maticek. If the editors of these journals have the strength to act, then perhaps other publishers, publications and institutions will be emboldened to tackle this stain on British psychology as well.

While there is every reason to correct the scientific record for the sake of the integrity of science itself, there are real and pressing reasons beyond.

As Pelosi powerfully writes, “these widely cited studies have had direct and indirect influences on some people’s smoking and lifestyle choices. This means that for an unknown and unknowable number of individual men and women, this programme of research has been a contributory factor in premature illness and death.”