#2830: David Feinstein

Emotional Freedom Technique is an infamous but relatively widespread pseudopsychiatric therapy that claims to heal the mind and a range of psychological (and physical) problems using, in a handwavy manner, the ideas of acupuncture. Specifically, EFT therapists claim to manipulate the body’s ‘energy field’ through acupressure and to access meridians while focusing on a specific traumatic memory. Needless to say, it is pure pseudoscience, and doesn’t remotely work; indeed, the idea – like the ideas behind energy medicine in general – is not only raging bullshit but fractally wrong.

 

Now, we’ve encountered EFT before, since – despite its desperate lack of plausibility, evidence or coherent underpinnings – the nonsense is, as mentioned, quite popular (though in fairness: most psychologists easily recognize it as absolute bullshit).

 

And despite the implausibility of the ideas, proponents of EFT have long been engaged in some serious pseudoscience to try to lend the technique a sheen of scientific legitimacy. Central to that strategy is the work of energy psychology proponents like Dawson Church and David Feinstein. In a 2008 review, Feinstein concluded that energy psychology (EFT in particular) was a “rapid and potent treatment for a range of psychological conditions” based on systematically ignoring all the evidence demonstrating that EFT doesn’t work; like so many other pseudoscientists, Feinstein also failed to disclose his conflict of interest as an owner of an online shop for energy psychology products. Unfazed, Feinstein published another review in 2012, according to which energy psychology techniques “consistently demonstrated strong effect sizes and other positive statistical results that far exceed chance after relatively few treatment sessions” based on employing the exact same technique as last time: systematically dismissing or ignoring high-quality studies (which consistently show no positive effect) in favor of methodologically worthless small studies that did suggest an effect.

 

Indeed, over the years, Feinstein has published a number of pseudoscientific papers and reviews based on shoddy pseudostudies, including for instance “Manual Stimulation of Acupuncture Points” (in Journal of Psychotherapy Integration). In the very same journal issue, real scientists with intellectual integrity and deploying real methodological techniques (like the AMSTAR2 analysis criteria) on the same material, concluded that the studies Feinstein relied on were of “critically low” quality and poorly carried out, concluding (since they actually deployed methodological rigor and, unlike Feinstein, were concerned with accuracy and accountability) that EFT was pseudoscience and an “unsinkable rubber duck”.

 

Feinstein has written a number of books and done a number of podcasts (e.g. for the aptly named Sounds True with New-Age-woo promoter Donna Eden), and is also on the board of editors of the journal Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, and Treatment, ostensibly “a peer-reviewed professional journal dedicated to reporting developments in the field of energy psychology”; unfortunately, this is the kind of pseudoscientific journal that takes the notion of “peer review” way to literally. It’s board of editors also include the other central leaders of the EFT cult: Dawson Church, Larry Dossey, Charles Tart, Norman Shealy, James Oschman, orthomolecular medicine champion Hyla Cass and Stanley Krippner, the parapsychologist whose parody-friendly work was a crucial part of the foundation for The Men Who Stare at Goats.

 

Diagnosis: Militant pseudoscience. And once again, it is fascinating (but also, of course, frightening) to see the complex but likely completely unconscious strategies proponents of pseudoscience use to avoid reality and the evidence that unambiguously demonstrate that what they advocate is bullshit: Yes, we do think Feinstein is a true believer, and when he systematically champions shoddy nonsense studies and desperately dismiss (or simply ignore) the actual evidence, we suspect he is doing so in good faith – unbelievable as it might sound.