In research methods, a double-blind study is an experimental procedure in which neither the subjects of the experiment nor the persons conducting the experiment know the critical aspects of the experiment. Blinding the subject guards against the placebo effect (single-blind experiment). Blinding the tester guards against experimenter bias (single-blind experiment). Guarding against both is a double-blind procedure. Sometimes, you can compare one group using a method against another group using a second method that cannot achieve that goal. The second group is a “control” group. In that case, the control group’s method is like a placebo that has no known effect.
You may hear people say, “but you haven’t run double-blind experiments,” as a criticism of the claims of a researcher. I noticed this when a California doctor criticized the off-label use of Etanercept by Dr. Edward Tobinick of Boca Raton, Florida, which can clear the inflammation in the brain of stroke patients. While Tobinick’s off-label treatment carries serious risks, there is no doubt that his greatly improved stroke patients, recorded on “before” and “after” videos, are success stories. It is not possible for stroke patients to “take a placebo” because that would imply an injection of some other substance into the spine and brain, which would be foolhardy at best and quite likely lethal. It is not possible to “have a placebo effect” from the injection because that would entail the paralyzed and cognitively impaired patient performing in some ways that were utterly impossible for the patient prior to the Etanercept injection. The symptoms of stroke are not unique to individuals; they are specific to the part of the brain that has been damaged by a blood clot or by a haemorrhage. We already know from the medical histories of millions of stroke patients that without this particular treatment or some other extraordinary experimental treatment that their symptoms remain the same or deteriorate. Those untreated stroke victims are the “control” group. There is nothing about the knowledge or demeanor of the technicians or doctors involved that could possibly draw the same kinds of responses from the patients—an experimenter effect—as the drug does soon after it is injected into the spinal cord and flows into the brain (http://www.nrimed.com/uncategorized/60-minutes-australia-reverse-stroke-23-min-version/).
Double-blind studies of Focused Listening are run every time the method is tried on a new condition.
Testing Focused Listening against the Tomatis Method has effectively been done when you compare Daniel’s recovery from schizophrenia with Tomatis‘s and Berard’s failures with schizophrenia and their uneven success with autism (infantile schizophrenia). Furthermore, my method comes with a comprehensive neurological explanation, a hitherto unknown understanding of cerebral integration, and better information about longitudinal treatment. Bérard’s AIT practitioners have discovered that autism patients require much longer treatment times and Norman Doidge’s account of an autism healing with the Tomatis Method included longitudinal, follow-up, at-home treatment,[1] both of which are confirmations of my findings with Daniel that the usual two-week protocol of Tomatis and Bérard are inadequate for schizophrenia. My neurological paradigm allows for an explanation of why binaural treatments are less likely to be helpful in conditions of cerebral non-dominance. “Testing” Focused Listening is not the same as testing a drug against a placebo or one drug against another drug. As in the Tobinick experiments, we already know that the outcome of non-treatment of any kind is the persistence of symptoms. The Harrow study[2] is an excellent demonstration that conventional treatment of schizophrenia with antipsychotic medication leads to the persistence of symptoms. Dyslexic syndrome, bipolar disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome/fibromyalgia, and schizophrenia are chronic. Why? Because the cause and cure for those conditions was not known and still is not widely known. So, if you have a treatment that cures the syndrome—or all of those syndromes—you don’t need a double-blind study because the control group is “everyone who has ever lived with that chronic condition until now.” There also is no need for a control group when the research of other scientists can stand for the control group.
When I focused music only on Daniel’s right ear, it was a double-blind experiment because neither I nor Daniel had any idea whether or not it would cure his schizophrenia. He had been schizophrenic for 10 years. I vaguely recalled that Alfred Tomatis thought the right ear was more important than the left ear. I had not read any of Tomatis’s writing. I had read Paul Madaule’s book[3] that reported on his personal healing from dyslexic syndrome by Tomatis with a binaural method. The Tomatis Method Daniel and I had experienced was binaural and used electronically filtered the music, which we were led to believe was essential to healing, which proved not to be the case as we learned later. Daniel had shown a positive response to wearing my ordinary headphones binaurally and listening to ordinary CDs of a Mozart violin concerto for a few minutes in mid-November. I used those headphones binaurally. Yet, a couple of days later, I acted on my intuition when I improvised my innovative, right-ear technique on Daniel. We persisted for four weeks without seeing much change. On a day in mid-January, he “awakened” mentally during the afternoon. His brain function remained normal for the next two years.
No one else had ever cured schizophrenia with music, even with a binaural method, but I did not yet realize that Focused Listening was uniquely suited to curing certain mental conditions. Later, as I kept on doing research about symptoms I had noticed about Daniel that were not mentioned in psychiatric texts or other literature, I was able to draw certain conclusions about how the brain works because my Focused Listening was a unique experiment that limited treatment to his right ear.
Was Focused Listening’s effect replicable?
It worked again for Daniel in 2008, after his relapse into psychosis after taking LSD at the end of 2007. Eight years later, when he relapsed early in 2016, he recovered again by using Focused Listening, without medication, between February and late July.
Was Focused Listening’s effect replicable for others?
I helped at least 30 people locally and online with a range of mental problems that responded to Focused Listening, including one young man with psychosis from a head injury. All of those were “double-blind studies” because each person was breaking new ground with this innovative music therapy. I invited at least three times that many people to try Focused Listening, but some people prefer to remain mentally ill if they can get away with it, especially if they have addictions. Sadly, among those who refused to use Focused Listening, at least three schizophrenics died: one from his medications, one from an overdose of street drugs, and one from a bizarre experiment. Some healings lasted well. Some healings were interrupted or reversed sooner or later by substance abuse but worked well apart from those other influences. Some healings were for conditions I would not have anticipated, for example, surviving chemotherapy without developing bipolar disorder or stopping stage fright. When several parents of mentally ill children decided to try Focused Listening, I saw people without a mental illness gaining in energy, self-control, thinking ability, self-confidence, right-lateralization, and communication ability. All of these healings confirmed the neurological paradigm of right-ear driven left-brain dominance in cerebral integration.
Was Focused Listening’s effect replicable for other schizophrenics?
I thought it would be, but my only other psychotic client had suffered a head injury, which is not the typical etiology for schizophrenia.
Since January this year (2018), six schizophrenics have begun using Focused Listening and, despite medications, all are showing signs of increasing left-brain dominance. Three have begun medication withdrawal. The young man reducing only one drug is very close to achieving normal integration. Another six families are considering Focused Listening for psychosis.
[1] Norman Doidge, The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Recoveries and Discoveries from the Fontiers of Neuroplasticity(New York: Viking, The Penguin Group, 2015), 319–28.
[2] M. Harrow, T. H. Jobe and R. N. Faull, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA, “Does treatment of schizophrenia with antipsychotic medications eliminate or reduce psychosis? A 20-year multi-follow-up study,” (Psychological Medicine, Page 1 of 10. © Cambridge University Press 2014 doi:10.1017/S0033291714000610).
[3] Paul Madaule, When Listening Comes Alive (Norval, Ont.: Moulin Publishing, 1993).