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Time flies
Time is ticking
– Howard Devoto / Peter Shelley / John Alexander McGeoch (magazine)
A year ago I wrote a post about Guruji Mahendra Kumar Trivedi, an “enlightened and miraculous being” with hundreds of publications in low quality journals that have little or no peer review. The article in question claimed that Trivedi has the ability to heal the body and mind through his “biofield energy transfers” (a proprietary blessing treatment, Trivedi Effect®). These claims are supernatural, with no basis in physical reality. The results appeared in Journal of general and family medicine (published by Wiley and indexed by PubMed), which is apparently a reputable journal (as opposed to “predatory” journals that have accepted the vast majority of Trivedi’s other articles).
So I wrote a detailed letter to the editor about my concerns (full text in my previous post):
Dr. Okayama and the editors in Journal of general and family medicine,
I am writing about the legitimacy of an article published in the journal:
Trivedi, MK, Branton, A., Trivedi, D., Mondal, S., & Jana, S. (2023). The role of biofield energy therapy on psychological symptoms, mental disorders and stress-related quality of life in adults: A randomized controlled clinical trial. Journal of general and family medicine, 24(3), 154-163.
In this article, the first author (Mahendra Kumar Trivedi, also known as “Guruji” on the Divine Connection website) makes extraordinary and unvalidated claims about his ability to alter the state of matter – and the mental and physical health of human volunteers – via the transmission of his thoughts (described as “blessing” throughout the manuscript). A peer-reviewed journal that accepts such statements without indisputable scientific evidence, which was never provided, has compromised its scientific reputation. Furthermore, the study’s design is flawed, and much of the data in the article is implausible and inauthentic.
. . .
Time flies
Time is ticking
– ibid
Six months later (24 January 2025), the journal issued a retraction based on my concerns.1
WITHDRAWAL: MK Trivedi, A. Branton, D. Trivedi, S. Mondal, and S. Jana, “The Role of Biofield Energy Therapy on Psychological Symptoms, Mental Health Disorders, and Stress-Related Quality of Life in Adults: A Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial,” Journal of general and family medicine 24, no. 3 (2023): 154–163, https://doi.org/10.1002/jgf2.606.
The above article, published online on January 28, 2023 in the Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the editor-in-chief of the journal, Masanobu Okayama; Japan Primary Care Association; and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. The withdrawal has been agreed following an investigation of concerns raised by a third party (this blog), which revealed an inappropriate control group used as the placebo group in the study, inconsistencies in the psychological survey, highly unlikely functional biomarker values that are outside the typical physiological range, and unsupported claims of scientific evidence behind the biofield energy treatment. The authors were informed, but the explanation and partial raw data provided were considered insufficient to address the concerns. Thus, the editors have lost confidence in the data presented and consider the results and conclusions of this manuscript to be insufficiently supported and substantially compromised. The authors disagree with the retraction.
How did that publication get into print?? Other bloggers have written about the Wiley fiasco (when they bought Hindawi, along with a bunch of unrecognized journals, for $300 million). It’s a long and boring story…
Further reading
The Miraculous Guru with an h-index of 62
Backed by science? Building a lucrative spiritual empire based on potentially “dubious” publications
Footnote
1 At this point, I was preoccupied with the horrible executive orders (ie, illegal orders) issued by the president.
