Create Your New Reality

What if I told you that a 7-day meditation retreat could rewire your brain, reprogram your cells, activate natural pain-relief mechanisms, and heal nearly every ailment through the power of thought alone? 

And it’s backed by science! 

“Sign me up,” you say.

 

But wait, before you invest $2,500 dollars, let me tell you about the amazing new study published in Communications Biology.

“This intensive non-pharmacological mind-body intervention produces broad short-term neural and plasma-based molecular changes associated with enhanced neuroplasticity, metabolic reprogramming, and modulation of functional cell signaling pathways…” says the abstract. 

“Science is the new language of mysticism,” says the maestro of meditation. 

 

The Paper

Neural and molecular changes during a mind-body reconceptualization, meditation, and open label placebo healing intervention 

 

This paper reports an ambitious, logistically difficult study of 20 participants before and after they attended a week-long meditation retreat. A raft of blood and brain biomarkers were collected by a team of researchers from UC San Diego, a meditation research conglomerate, a clinical trials consulting firm, and the Institute of Advanced Consciousness Studies.  [registration in ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT06615531]

The retreat consisted of three mind-body interventions:

• Reconceptualization (25 hours)
• Meditation (33 hours)
• Guided healing rituals (5 hours) conceptualized as “open label placebo”

There was no way to differentiate any unique biological correlate(s) because the “mind-body” components were always delivered together. I will leave aside (for now) the possibility that all three interventions might be placebos, because THERE WAS NO CONTROL GROUP exposed to a different condition, an alternate treatment, or even a waiting list.

Reconceptualization: 

"Daily lectures emphasized the body’s self-healing abilities, the mind’s capacity to shape lived reality, and the healing power of present-centeredness and mystical-type experiences."

Meditation: 

"All meditations were guided, delivered with atmospheric music, and taught Kundalini techniques, which combine conscious meta-awareness and conscious breathing exercises with slow, ascending, focused interoceptive attention on purported energetic centers along the midline..."

Guided healing: 

These "brought 6–8 “healers” around one “healee” in which the former were instructed to practice loving-kindness compassion meditation while focusing attention on their heart, hands, and on the latter’s body."

 

The study generated a staggering number of data points¹ (~100,000). Collecting and analyzing such a wide array of measures took an extraordinary amount of work, and the authors are to be commended for this. They created a nifty figure of their outcome measures (shown below).

 

Fig. 1A. Outcome measures to capture biological changes associated with brain and body. Created with BioRender. Simpson, S., Jinich, A. (2025). BioRender.com/ryzs1cd.

Before offering my own opinion, here's how the authors presented their work to the public:

GROUNDBREAKING RESULTS: THE DISCOVERY THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING 

-- This is from a paid press release. 

The landmark study demonstrates how intensive meditation can trigger the same profound brain activity previously documented only with psychedelic substances – while simultaneously activating measurable biological transformations throughout the entire body. 

In just seven days, without any pharmaceutical intervention, retreat participants achieved what researchers are calling a "biological reset" – rewired neural networks, boosted cellular nerve cell growth, reprogrammed cellular energy systems, and activated natural pain-relief mechanisms. Research data also shows study subjects' "mystical experience" scores – measured via self-reporting – increased significantly in a group of 20 individuals within the seven-day event. 

 

OK then. Well... My take is different. I suggest some of these claims are not supported by scientific evidence, based on procedural and analytic flaws that occur throughout the manuscript and supplementary materials. 

 

Claim 1. Enhanced Neuroplasticity (greater neurite outgrowth)

“Participants’ anecdotal reports consistently emphasize radical psychological breakthroughs, and previous meditation studies have reported increased BDNF levels consistent with enhanced neuroplasticity. To investigate whether the intervention affected circulating plasma factors conducive to neuroplasticity, we treated cultured glutamatergic PC12 neuroendocrine cells with NGF (nerve growth factor) and 1% pre- and post-intervention plasma and quantified neurite outgrowth length.”

 

Result 1. PC12 cells treated with plasma from all 20 participants

PC12 cells are not primarily glutaminergic. PC12 is a cell line derived from a pheochromocytoma (tumor) of the rat adrenal gland. The cells synthesize, store, and release catecholamines. PC12 cells can be induced to differentiate into neuron-like cells. When treated with NGF, they extend neurite-like processes. Subsequent treatment with a variety of agents can elucidate specific cellular mechanisms.

Here, a problematic choice was that plasma from all 20 participants was combined into one soup, which eliminated individual variation and prevented mechanistic insights. Further, plasma samples from novice and advanced meditators (who showed different molecular profiles in other analyses) were pooled.

 

Claim 2. Metabolic Reprogramming (shift toward glycolytic metabolism)

“Previous studies have characterized meditation as a hypometabolic state and reported enhanced glycolysis in Tibetan Buddhist monks. To test the intervention’s effect on real-time metabolism, we treated BE(2)M17 human neuroblastoma cells with 1% plasma from all participants for 60 min and performed Seahorse XF assays.”

 

Result 2A. Pooled Plasma (loss of individual metabolic signatures)

Once again, the claim of “significant” changes in glycolysis is based on comparing two pooled samples (basically n=1 vs. n=1). We can't determine which plasma components (or which individual participants) drove the metabolic changes. *

Result 2B. Preselected Proteins (Fig. 4E, glycolysis proteomics heat map)

The authors didn't explain their criteria for choosing 19 proteins involved in glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation (out of hundreds). Was the selection biased in some way? Were important proteins missing?

Claim 3. Modulation of Functional Cell Signaling Pathways (proteomics)

“To investigate the intervention’s effects on the plasma proteome, 7596 proteins were quantified with the SomaScan Assay v4.1.   ...  Volcano plot analysis (Fig. 5A) revealed 21 significantly altered proteins. Cofilin-2 (COF2) and Enoyl-CoA hydratase were significantly upregulated, which suggests enhanced cellular processes related to cytoskeletal regulation and fatty acid metabolism.”

 

Result 3A. Only 21 out of 7596 proteins were significantly altered (far less than chance)

How did that happen?? The proteomic and metabolomic analyses were exploratory and hypothesis-free, but... with 7,596 proteins tested at p < .05, the expected number of false positives is ~380 proteins (5% of 7,596). Statistical correction for multiple comparisons was inconsistently applied across measures. Even within the Proteomics category, Table 5 says p<.05 but the Methods (p. 14) indicate that FDR correction was applied (false discovery rate).

Result 3B. Tiny Effect Size (Fig. 5A, linear fold change of 0.25 in either direction) 

This means there was only a 25% increase or decrease in these proteins after the retreat, which may be within technical or biological noise levels. Most studies require at least 1.5 fold changes for biological relevance. Elsewhere, for the protein-protein interaction networks in Fig. 5B, they used either p<.05 OR fold change >.5, which is still problematic. Use more stringent criteria instead (FDR < 0.05 AND fold change > 1.5).

Across the entire study, the chance of false positive results is high.

 

Claim 4. Upregulation of Anti-Inflammatory and Inflammatory Markers (dynamic process of immune modulation)

“To assess whether the intervention elicited inflammatory or anti-inflammatory cascades, we examined a panel of 23 inflammatory and 21 anti-inflammatory proteins (Fig. 5E). We found significant upregulation of inflammatory markers ... Interestingly, we also observed a significantly upregulated anti-inflammatory markers index... Concurrent activation of both pathways suggests a dynamic process of immune modulation, possibly reflecting enhanced cellular turnover or repair mechanisms.”

Result 4A. Upregulation of Inflammatory Markers is Bad (negative effects of the retreat?)

This result is certainly the opposite of what would be expected. Some studies suggest that meditation can reduce inflammatory markers (lower IL-6, TNF-α, CRP, etc.). For an intervention that ostensibly promotes well-being and neuroplasticity, increased inflammation is counterintuitive and potentially harmful. The authors didn't consider alternative explanations, such as: 

• Stress – the intensive retreat format (10-12 hours daily) could be physically/psychologically stressful
• Sleep Deprivation – long meditation hours might reduce sleep and trigger inflammation 
• Dietary Changes – retreat food and eating patterns might differ from normal

Result 4B. Incorrect Statistical Reporting (namely, incorrect effect sizes)

This occurs elsewhere in the paper, but here are three examples. 

t = 2.25, p = 0.03, Cohen's d = 0.09  0.50
t = -2.09, p = 0.04, Cohen's d = -0.65  -0.47
t = 3.81, p = 0.0001, Cohen's d = 0.15  0.85

Claim 5. Alterations in Functional Brain Activity (related to meditation)

“To characterize the neural signature of the meditative state, participants underwent structural and blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI scans during rest (5 min) and meditation (15 min). 
...
fMRI data showed that this meditation style functionally disrupts the default mode and salience networks (responsible for self-referential thought and allostatic regulation) and cerebellum-prefrontal predictive processing circuits involved in integrating internal models with external sensory data.”

 

Result 5A. Explosion of fMRI Features (an excess of networks, regions, and parcellations)

The authors chose redundant and superfluous ways to analyze the data, increasing the risk of false positive results.

Seven Canonical Resting State Networks
- within-network connectivity: ~50-100 features per network
- between-network connectivity: 21 pairs
- subtotal: ~400-700 features

Eight ROIs (regions of interest)
- all pairwise connections: 28 unique pairs

Harvard-Oxford Atlas (48 regions)
- all pairwise connections: 48×47/2 = 1,128 features

Power Atlas (264 regions)
- all pairwise connections: 264×263/2 = 34,716 features

Total fMRI Features: ~36,500+

 

Result 5B. Significant Results Caused by Head Motion? (difference between rest and meditation)

During the 5 minute resting state scan, participants were told to “not move, keep eyes open, stay awake, and think about whatever you want, but do not meditate.”  During the 15 minute meditation scan, participants were instructed to “not move, listen to the guided meditation soundtrack, and meditate as suggested by the audio while keeping your eyes open.”

A few things:

• The guided meditation has a bombastic audio soundtrack, while the resting state is silent 
• It would have been beneficial to compare auditory cortex activity for meditation vs. rest
• Breathing exercises during meditation can increase head movement

The authors admit this show-stopping confound of greater head motion during the meditation scan. 

“Participants moved more during meditation than rest, a potential confound revealed by the significant effect of task (meditation, rest) on mean framewise displacement on a two-way (task × time) repeated measures ANOVA (n = 19, F(1,18) = 25.1, p = 0.00009, η²p = 0.58).”

Thus, the functional connectivity differences between meditation and rest could explained by head motion, not by changes in brain activity. Even tiny movements (0.5 mm) create spurious correlations between regions. The effect size above indicates that 58% of variance in movement was explained by meditation vs. rest. The whopping p-value above was reported in the abstract, but in a different context:

“Meditation decreases functional integration in the default mode (p = 0.00009) and salience networks (p = 0.000003).”

Result 5C. Errors in the Framewise Displacement Spreadsheet (supplementary material)

Framewise displacement (FD) is a quality control metric that considers changes in six head motion parameters from one frame to the next. The authors said their results “were robust to excluding BOLD runs with mean framewise displacement > 0.3 mm, indicating they were not due to higher meditation-associated head motion.” I wasn't sure what they meant by "run" (an entire 5 min block? how many blocks tossed? why wasn't a more stringent cutoff used?). 

At any rate, the Supplementary Material lists a temporal string of FD values for all subjects and conditions. Some numbers in the spreadsheet looked like this, '0.5053053200000001 (an extraneous apostrophe) while the pre and post values for the Rest condition were identical, suggesting some kind of copy/paste error (see screenshot below).

Claim 6. Machine Learning Models Discriminated Pre- and Post-Meditation States with High Accuracy

“We applied machine learning to identify the most biologically relevant features across time point (pre/post) and experience level (novice/advanced) datasets. Each dataset was preprocessed (log-transformed and auto-centered) and missing data was imputed to ensure feature scaling, normalization consistency, and data integrity and comparability across modalities. Post-preprocessing, ELISA, metabolomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics datasets were concatenated into a single feature matrix used as input for an eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier chosen for its ability to handle high-dimensional data. ... both models achieved strong discrimination between pre- and post-meditation states (XGBoost AUC = 0.86; Random Forest AUC = 0.90).”

Result 6. Extreme Overfitting (with no way to validate in an independent sample)

Unless I'm mistaken, they dumped ALL the data, including ~36,500 fMRI features, into one giant classifier. This guarantees overfitting. With 100,000 features and 20 samples, the model can memorize the training data. In contrast, 1 feature per 10 samples is often recommended as the minimum for stable ML. There was no validation set, because you can't split 20 samples into training and testing sets. There was no independent cohort, so you can't see if the findings will generalize to another population. The impossibly high AUCs of 0.86-0.90 are meaningless: you could basically use random numbers and get these values. 

Then there were exploratory correlations between self-report scores on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) and the top 14 features per model, which I'll skip for now. [The MEQ is typically used to rate psychedelic experiences, not meditative experiences. The scores here are a clear reflection of this difference.]

Major Weaknesses

1. No control group (can't separate meditation from the passage of time)
2. Massive overfitting (100,000 features, 20 people)
3. Major motion confound
4. Uncorrected multiple comparisons
5. Inconsistent statistics
6. Possible p-hacking and post hoc explanations

 

Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest

The meditation teacher (Dr. Joe Dispenza) is an author on the paper. He declared his employment with Encephalon, Inc., which offers the meditation retreats. However, the $10 million award (gift) to the senior author (Dr. Hemal H. Patel of UCSD) from InnerScience Research Fund isn't fully explained. Dr. Joe owns InnerScience. So the person who ran the week-long retreat for 1,444 attendees in San Diego (see CONSORT flow diagram in Fig. 1D) also funded the research project and co-authored the article. Dr. Patel recently received another $2.45 million from InnerScience.

 

Next time we'll take a closer look at Dr. Joe Dispenza.

 

* CORRECTION (November 23 2025): I believe the comments I wrote for Result 2A are wrong, due to my misreading of the authors' quoted text in Claim 2. However, Figs. 4D and 4F (p. 6 of the paper) do show individual data points. The analysis for Claim 2 — Metabolic Reprogramming — did NOT use pooled plasma.

On the other hand, Result 1 — PC12 cells treated with plasma from all 20 participants — DID use pooled plasma, as quoted on p. 15:

"PC12 cells ... were cultured in [media] under standard conditions... On Day 0, differentiation was induced by plating cells ... and culturing them with Opti-MEM medium supplemented with 0.5% FBS, 1% penicillin/streptomycin, 50 ng/mL NGF, and either 1% human plasma pooled from pre- and post-intervention or no plasma (control cells)..."

and on p. 16:

"PC12 assay plates were prepared with pooled plasma (n = 20) with 2 technical replicates (wells) per treatment (pre-plasma/post-plasma/no treatment)."

I apologize for the error. 

A more detailed version of this post appears at PubPeer. A commenter there pointed out that the study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov after it was completed. 

 

Footnote

¹ To preview, my take is that ~100,000 data points per participant (n=20 or less) were fed into machine learning (ML) models. Oh no.

 

Reference 

Jinich-Diamant A, Simpson S, Zuniga-Hertz JP, Chitteti R, Schilling JM, Bonds JA, Case L, Chernov AV, Dispenza J, Maree J, Amkie Stahl NE, Licamele M, Fazlalipour N, Devulapalli S, Christov-Moore L, Reggente N, Poirier MA, Moeller-Bertram T, Patel HH. Neural and molecular changes during a mind-body reconceptualization, meditation, and open label placebo healing intervention. Communications Biology. 2025 Nov 6;8(1):1525.

 

 

The highly speculative model below interprets the findings within a Bayesian brain framework. The figure shows superficial pyramidal cells (layers 2/3), deep pyramidal cells (layers 5/6), a neuromodulatory cell, and information flow. It's a cellular-level circuit diagram based on:

• Group-level fMRI (resolution: ~3mm³)
• Blood samples
• 20 people
• Motion artifacts

Fig. 9. Potential cortical implementation. Hierarchical predictive coding scheme showing how the three mind-body techniques may synergistically facilitate a more flexible and adaptive predictive system.

MAKE AMERICANS DIE EARLIER: the decimation of CDC under the ghoulish RFK Jr.

Dr. Susan Monarez, a microbiologist and public health specialist, was fired from her job as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after less than a month. She refused to support the catastrophic policies of her boss, antivax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Even RFK Jr. says we should never trust him for medical advice.

 

Dr. Monarez did not voluntarily leave her post, however. In a statement, her lawyers said:

“When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda.  … As a person of integrity and devoted to science, she will not resign.”

 

Several high-ranking officials quit the CDC in protest. In his resignation letter, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis stated the following:

“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.”

 

He called out the lies and quackery that will harm the American people, not make them healthy:

“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.

The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines favoring natural infection and unproven remedies will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer.  ...  Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.”

In a stunning rebuke, NINE former CDC Directors sounded the alarm in a New York Times editorial.

We Ran the C.D.C.: Kennedy Is Endangering Every American’s Health 

. . .

What the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.

Mr. Kennedy has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more. Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views...

 

The CDC debacle has generated tremendous criticism from Democrats and even Republicans in Congress, who own the shambles of public health and scientific research in the US. They approved the confirmation of a deranged man who...

...walks around barefoot in airplane bathrooms...

 

...swims in a contaminated creek with his grandchildren [where swimming is banned due to high levels of bacteria]...

 

...drinks raw milk [which “can contain a variety of disease-causing pathogens,” according to the FDA]... 

 

 ...recommends beef tallow for frying [instead of much healthier seed oils]...

 ...considered Coke with cane sugar (vs. high fructose corn syrup) to be a MAHA win [8 months after he condemned Trump's McDonald's fetish as 'poison']... 

 

You may remember that Trump rewarded RFK Jr. after the latter dropped his candidacy for president.

[Trump] repeated his pledge to establish a panel — “working with Bobby” — to investigate the increase in chronic health conditions and childhood diseases, including autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity and infertility.

 

Interestingly, RFK's former Vice Presidential running mate, billionaire Nicole Shanahan (who believes Burning Man is demonic), suggested that he should be appointed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, which is actually what happened. Kennedy pledged to fire 600 NIH employees on Day 1. In March 2025, he revealed his plan to “downsize” HHS from 80,000 to 60,000 employees. That's 25% fewer employees at agencies that include Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, NIH, FDA, and CDC.

His utter disregard of expertise and established scientific facts is exemplified by this Orwellian statement:

“We need to stop trusting the experts... Trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it's a feature of religion and totalitarianism.”

 

The exact opposite is true!

Totalitarian regimes ban experts because they can contradict the party line with rigorous evidence. An ignorant populace is a compliant populace. This is why Trump favors grossly unqualified Fox News hosts, QAnon conspiracy theorists, Putin puppets, and puppy killers. These right-wing bureaucrats are aptly called The Brain Rot Cabinet by Mother Jones. 

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya is a vengeful liar and a menace to society

Steve Bannon and Jay Bhattacharya — image from Important Context

I would like to draw your attention to the exceptional writing and devoted pro-science activism of Dr. Angie Rasmussen and Dr. Jeremy Berg.


1. Dr. Rasmussen is a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan who has countered the dangerous COVID misinformation of Jay Bhattacharya since 2020. It’s a travesty of American science that Bhattacharya was installed as the Trumpist bureaucrat tasked with the destruction of NIH, the world’s premiere funder of biomedical research.

Her latest masterwork of demolition compares Bhattacharya to Soviet fraudster (and Stalin favorite) Trofim Lysenko, who denied the genetic transmission of traits, persecuted his enemies, and killed seven million people in a famine of his own doing.

I urge you to read Dr. Rasmussen’s entire piece. Some highlights are below.

Bhattacharya is the New Lysenko

Starving the NIH through ineptitude, bitterness, and thirst for revenge

 

DR. ANGELA RASMUSSEN

…

Both [Lysenko and Bhattacharya] have capitalized on population-level disasters to climb out of academic obscurity into powerful positions. Both did so by advancing authoritarian political interests and telling a dictator what he wanted to hear. Both proposed and doubled down on policies that would kill millions of people, even resorting to manipulating or manufacturing data to justify them. Both were so emotionally fragile and unable to tolerate expert criticism that they pursued mortal vendettas against entire scientific fields of study. The only difference is that Lysenko hated genetics, while Bhattacharya hates public health, virology, and vaccines.

 

 

How much does Bhattacharya hate public health?

 

Bhattacharya first came to prominence with the Santa Clara serology study in April 2020, a widely pilloried preprint that claimed the mortality rate of COVID-19 was much lower than most other estimates. It was later revealed that this study was partly funded by the CEO of JetBlue Airlines, who was looking for data to support lifting pandemic-related restrictions on air travel. A few months later, Bhattacharya dropped the Great Barrington Declaration, a pandemic policy proposal calling for “vulnerable” people to isolate forever, while encouraging a COVID free-for-all everywhere else. That would have resulted in mass infection and another million deaths in the US if it had been implemented.

How much does Bhattacharya hate vaccines?

Bhattacharya started lying about vaccines in 2021. That was when he appeared on a panel hosted by “vaccine safety” fanatic Steve Kirsch and his Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Kulldorff, the anti-vax barrow-wight who is currently chairing ACIP, purging it of expertise, and trying to cancel the MMRV vaccine. At this panel, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff sat silent, nodding in tacit approval as Kirsch claimed falsely that COVID vaccines killed more than half a million people.

Her inevitable conclusion:
“Bhattacharya is the American Lysenko and must be removed as NIH Director.”

We know that Bhattacharya currently has control of American biomedical research, is eagerly gutting research that does not comport with his own mass death-inducing crank beliefs for Trump, and really wants revenge against anyone who ever pointed out that the Great Barrington Declaration would kill millions, the evidence does not show that the pandemic began with a lab leak, or that mRNA vaccine technology is safe, effective, and essential for pandemic preparedness. We know how this story will end. We must have the courage as a scientific community to stand united against it.

What can we do as scientists? Be as loud as possible and amplify messages such as these!

Support the American Public & HHS Employees — read and sign the letter.



2. Dr. Berg is a former Editor-in-Chief of Science and the former Director of NIGMS. He has embarked on a high-profile email campaign to call out Bhattacharya’s hypocrisy and incompetence as NIH Director, as well as the disastrous, politically-motivated decline in grant awards. Dr. Berg has documented these communiques on Bluesky. 

Among my favorites are:

 

Dr. Berg has recently collected some of his missives into a document called Fifty Shades of “Jay”, which starts out with helpful suggestions (which are ignored) but quickly reaches the conclusion that “Jay” is willfully ignorant and deceptive.

I have been closely monitoring NIH progress and policies throughout the year. When Director Bhattacharya began making public statements of various sorts that revealed his lack of knowledge about NIH, I started to send emails in good faith to share my knowledge about NIH programs with him to help him perform his important job more effectively. At first, he did not respond at all and when he did, he responded using the term “ideological boondoggles” without definition. This ill-advised behavior substantially decreased my hopes for his interest in receiving input about NIH programs and policies as it seemed that he had entrenched political perspectives.

 

I'm a fan of the Governor Newsom Press Office account on X, which mocks Trump's incoherent ALL CAPS ramblings. In the same vein, I endorse the ridicule of inept and unqualified Trumpist bureaucrats on social media and elsewhere.

 

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.

The Fragile Masculinity of MAGA Cancel Culture

 

Censorship. Surveillance. Loss of Privacy. Big Government. Stamping Out Due Process. Embracing the Evil Empire. Rejection of States’ Rights.

As the Trump regime enacts p. 555 of Project 2025 — illegal mobilization of the California National Guard without the Governor’s permission — the loss of personal freedoms is embraced by MAGA without a trace of irony.

 

100 Days of Lies

The Number One rule of the Trump administration is to lie. That's it. That's all. Once you understand this mandate, it's easier to realize that yes, the next outrage is false too.

Trump himself stands for nothing and no one (other than his own glory and wealth). He has no principles and no morals. He demands undying loyalty from his unqualified Cabinet and staff, but he'll throw them under a bus when he considers them a liability. 

What have been the goals of the first 100 days?

• to dismantle government institutions
• to demoralize federal workers
• to destroy liberal universities
• to demolish federally funded science 
• to deport law-abiding foreign students
• to enact a eugenics-based health care system
• to ruin the economy
• to pillage the environment
  
• to establish an authoritarian state 
• to consolidate Executive power 
• to neuter Congress and the Courts
• to eliminate conflicts of interest for Oligarchs
• to ensure a dictatorship for billionaires
• to redistribute wealth ever upwards
• to glorify the prejudice of white Christian nationalists
• to starve children in Sudan
• to generate sheer chaos
• to alienate international allies
• to scapegoat immigrants, minorities, and transgender people  
• TO CAUSE FEAR AND SUFFERING

 These goals have been achieved. The US is no longer a democracy. 

Are we winning yet??

 

100 Days of Failure

Even Fox News — in a rare moment of candor and truthfulness — has a hard time listing Trump's positive accomplishments.

100 Days of Hatred

Everyone deserves human dignity and due process. 

But cruelty is the point, the humiliation is deliberate.

The New DEI Is Domination, Exclusion, and Incompetence

There are so many unqualified, white male affirmative action hires in the Trump Administration (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth are among the worst). 

I've been trying hard to picture the end game.

I've been trying very hard to understand so many things, especially the unholy alliance between secular billionaire tech bros and the Heritage Foundation (i.e., the Christian theocracy outlined in Project 2025). One proposal: They share a common delusion — an unjustified faith in their own superiority, a self-declared directive to rule the universe and live forever. All other humans are condemned.

Therefore our lives are trivial.

 

Along with many other Americans, I'm angry and dejected. But we mustn't give up. I'll continue to write, and I'll continue to protest. My voice — and my writing — have been in exile for far too long.

On being a federal employee

Unhinged Nazi controls US government

 

UPDATE (Feb 6 2025): U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. has temporarily blocked the Fork in the Road fraud. However, I haven't yet been notified by the Musk youth who illegally infiltrated the computer systems at OPM.

I am a federal employee. And I will not comply with a series of illegal demands and threats, including the Fork in the Road “deferred resignation” program. It's an unenforceable sham, with no money allocated for these payouts.

Everything I write is old news by the time I finish the paragraph

An unelected oligarch has seized control of the US Federal Government. He feels entitled to execute this hostile and illegal takeover because he purchased the presidential election for Donald Trump, who has installed himself as dictator. Trump doesn't have a mandate for anything, despite what he says — he won the popular vote by only a narrow margin (49.8% vs. 48.3% for Vice President Kamala Harris). So now the Christian nationalists at the Heritage Foundation are setting policy for the rest of us, as written in their blueprint for oppression (see Project 2025).


Controlling (and Culling) the Federal Workforce Through Intimidation and Fear

Musk is treating the federal workforce like Twitter employees, meaning he wants to fire 80% of us. The “terms” of the deferred resignation offer (if you can call them that) keep changing:

January 28, 2025  (original Fork)

If you resign under this program, you will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason). 

However, the FAQ says that employees are not expected to work at all, while some sample contracts state that employees are agreeing to work through Feb. 28 (and payment comes with a caveat: “Subject to the availability of appropriations...”).

As the deadline approaches, threats to accept the offer have escalated.

“The reality is clear: A large-scale reduction, in response to the President’s workforce executive orders, is already happening. The government is restructuring, and unfortunately, many employees will later realize they missed a valuable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” [an anonymous] official said.

But the response thus far has been underwhelming. Recent news reports indicate that only 1% or 2% of 2.3 million federal workers have accepted the offer.¹ The deadline is February 6, 2025 at 11:59 EST 

UPDATE: A federal judge has temporarily blocked implementation of this fraudulent offer.

DOGE is a Clown Show (until it wasn't)

The Department of Government Efficiency is a make-believe entity. It has no official standing in the Executive Branch and yet issues one illegal memo after another. The most outrageous initial ploy — to “pause” Financial Assistance Programs — has been blocked by temporary stays and restraining orders. The ignorance and ineptitude of DOGE would be comical if critical programs for farmers, commercial fishermen, meat and poultry inspection, veterans, rural economic development, Medicare prescription drug coverage, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, NSF, NIH (and thousands more) weren't stalled for an indeterminate time period.

And the irony is that... 

I would welcome a true department of government efficiency to improve IT capabilities and to reduce the delays and administrative burdens involved in every aspect of research. It's discouraging. But I'm not leaving.

Footnote

¹ Great comment: 

This is not about you—your performance, your value, your contribution to public service. This is about a billionaire panicking because his big idea is collapsing under the weight of reality. He wants you afraid. He wants you to think that staying is a risk, that leaving is the only path to survival. It isn’t.