Table 1.

Ten methods that can help prove that your intervention is effective (even when it is not)

1. Express in all communications about the intervention that you as developer or expert believe it to be best intervention ever (helps to increase expectations in participants).

2. Do everything else that can increase expectations, such as writing books about the intervention, going to conferences to convince other professionals that this is the best intervention ever, giving interviews in the media showing your enthusiasm, preferably seasoned with some personal stories of participants who declare they have benefited very much from the intervention.

3. Use the ‘weak spots’ of randomised trials: let the assignment to conditions be done by research staff involved in the trial or do it yourself (not by an independent person not involved in the trial).

4. Do not conceal conditions to which participants were assigned to for the assessors of outcome.

5. Analyse only participants who completed the intervention and ignore those who dropped out from the intervention or the study (and do not examine all participants who were randomised).

6. Use multiple outcome instruments and report only the ones resulting in significantly positive outcomes for the intervention.

7. Use a small sample size in your trial (and just call it a ‘pilot randomised trial’).

8. Use a waiting list control group.

9. Do not compare the intervention to already existing ones (but do tell your colleagues that based on your clinical experiences you expect that this intervention is better than other existing ones (good for the expectations))

10. If the results are not positive, consider not publishing them and wait until one of the clinicians you have persuaded about the benefits of this intervention conducts a trial that does find positive outcomes