Are things taking off?
Just recently, I was in the town
centre, watching people, full of life, walking around, and it
occurred to me that if it wasn't for their false gravity beliefs,
they would be able to fly. Really fly that is, not in planes or
hang-gliders, but swoop through the air like Superman.
Excitedly, I rushed home. Well, to be
honest, it wasn't exactly a rush, or even a stroll, but it was the
best I could do. My first task was to come up with a hypothesis, then
a treatment, then a method of testing it out.
So my hypothesis that the Cannot Fly
Syndrome is based on a false belief in the powers of so-called
gravity, a force which just does not fit into the known structure of
atomic forces. Now I have lived on this planet for a very long time,
and in observing people over that period, I have come to a lot of
disturbing conclusions. One of these is that people can, under
pressure, forget almost anything (even, as one Prime Minister
discovered, forgetting a daughter when leaving a pub). So I propose
to use a Clapping Bats Technique, to startle people into forgetting
their perceived limitations. It is my belief, based on no evidence
whatsoever, that this will work.*
Then I needed a good way of determining
who could be classified as “people”. Using the Oxymoron Criteria
to define people – living creatures capable of walking around for
sustained short periods on two legs – I realised that I was
fortunate in that my garden was visited by a constant procession of
people, particularly if I had scattered some seed or breadcrumbs.
Before conducting the study, I produced
my statistical analysis plan and published it in a very secure place:
I can't remember where, but that isn't important, because I have no
intention of actually using it: it seems that the only important
point of such a plan is to pre-publish it. But I did calculate that I
needed 720 people to take part in the study, so that even utterly
minimal changes could be shown to be statistically significant**.
I employed random testing procedures,
looking out of the window each morning and tossing a coin. If it came
down heads, I would burst out of the door, clap my table tennis bats
together and observe the reaction. Sure enough, virtually every time,
the people would rise into the air and fly away. If I did not burst
out and use CBT, they would remain in the garden, ostensibly
inspecting the seed and breadcrumbs.
There were a couple of exceptions to
this though. Neither my son nor my wife actually managed to take
flight, although on occasions they did jump a bit. It was clearly a
case of Pervasive Refusal Syndrome: I thank Esther Crawley for coming
up with the term.
But I would like to emphasise that the
ability to fly is not a simple state of affairs: rather it is the
process towards that ability that is important. Consequently, I have
reduced my targets in a very minor way, and now include an ability to
have both feet off the ground at the same time as being indicative of
the ability to fly. This minor modification to the criteria used to
define flying has been approved by my trial committee, and defended
by my good friend who pointed out that even transatlantic aircraft
have to modify their flight plans according to local conditions.
You will be pleased to hear that I am
now able to report a 100% success rate for CBT, and am now attempting
to have my paper printed in that bastion of flight analysis, The
Javelin. I'm already lining up my friends to give it a quick
peer-review. I have also set up the Aviation Media Centre who will
prime the media.
Of course, there will be naysayers:
cynics who doubt the results of rigorous scientific studies such as
these. I would simply like to point out that there is a precedent. In
the study of M.E., a small group of psychiatrists created their own
set of criteria that allowed them take the people suffering from ME
and to add people with fatigue that was due to depression, anxiety,
undiagnosed sleep problems, along with unusual and difficult to
diagnose conditions such as hemechromatosis. Studies of this group
showed that psychological therapies may have helped some of the
group's thoughts about their illness, so recommended that this was an
effective way to treat everyone in the group, including those with
ME. They even managed to claim recovery by setting targets below the
level that many scored at the start of the trial.
You don't believe that could have
happened? Well, surprisingly enough, nor does it seem do many of the
UK medical hierarchy or the media, despite the facts. I guess we will
have to wait another thirty years for a proper tribunal to
investigate the matter. At least they have come to their senses in
America, and have decided to completely ignore any study involving
the UK psychiatrists and their weird selection criteria for ME.
*The Department of Transport has funded
this study in the hope that they will no longer need to maintain
roads.
** For an explanation of this, wait for
the next blog.