RETRACTED: phony study on "biofield energy" treatment by a Guru

Time flies
Time crawls

– Howard Devoto / Peter Shelley / John Alexander Mcgeoch (Magazine)

 

 image from Google Scholar

 

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-to-no peer review. The specific paper in question claimed that Trivedi has the ability to heal the body and mind through his “biofield energy transmissions” (a proprietary blessing treatment, the Trivedi Effect®). These claims are supernatural, with no basis in physical reality. The results appeared in the Journal of General and Family Medicine (published by Wiley and indexed by PubMed), which is seemingly a reputable journal (unlike the “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 earlier post):

 

Dr. Okayama and the Editorial Staff of the Journal of General and Family Medicine,  

I am writing about the legitimacy of an article published in the journal:

Trivedi, M. K., Branton, A., Trivedi, D., Mondal, S., & Jana, S. (2023). The role of biofield energy treatment on psychological symptoms, mental health disorders, and stress‐related quality of life in adult subjects: A randomized controlled clinical trial. Journal of General and Family Medicine, 24(3), 154-163.

 

In this paper, the first author (Mahendra Kumar Trivedi, also known as “Guruji” on the Divine Connection website) makes extraordinary and unvalidated claims about his ability to change the state of matter – and the mental and physical health of human volunteers – via transmission of his thoughts (described as “blessing” throughout the manuscript). A peer-reviewed journal that accepts such declarations without incontrovertible scientific evidence, which was never provided, has compromised its scientific reputation. Furthermore, the study’s design is flawed and much of the data contained in the paper is implausible and inauthentic.

. . .

 

Time flies
Time crawls

–ibid

Six months later (24 January 2025), the journal issued a retraction based on my concerns.¹ 

 

RETRACTION: M. K. Trivedi, A. Branton, D. Trivedi, S. Mondal, and S. Jana, “The Role of Biofield Energy Treatment on Psychological Symptoms, Mental Health Disorders, and Stress-Related Quality of Life in Adult Subjects: 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 28 January 2023 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editor-in-Chief, Masanobu Okayama; the Japan Primary Care Association; and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. The retraction has been agreed upon following an investigation into concerns raised by a third party [this blog], which revealed an inappropriate control group used as the placebo group of the trial, inconsistencies in the Psychological Questionnaire Scoring, highly implausible functional biomarker values that are out of the typical physiological range, and unsupported claims regarding the scientific evidence behind the biofield energy treatment. The authors were informed, however, the explanation and the partial raw data provided were deemed insufficient to address the concerns. Thus, the editors have lost confidence in the presented data and consider the results and conclusions of this manuscript insufficiently supported and substantially compromised. The authors disagree with the retraction.

 

How did that publication slip into print?? Other bloggers have written about the Wiley fiasco (when they bought Hindawi, along with a heaping pile of unreputable journals, for $300 million). It's a long and sordid tale...

Further Reading

The Miraculous Guru with an h-index of 62

Backed by Science? Building a lucrative spiritual empire based on potentially “questionable” publications

 

Footnote

¹ By this time, I was preoccupied by the horrendous Executive Orders (i.e., illegal edicts) issued by the President.