title: How to prove that your therapy is effective, even when it is not: a guideline.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Suppose you are the developer of a new therapy for a mental health problem or you have several years of experience working with such a therapy, and you would like to prove that it is effective. Randomised trials have become the gold standard to prove that interventions are effective, and they are used by treatment guidelines and policy makers to decide whether or not to adopt, implement or fund a therapy.
  
  
  METHODS
  You would want to do such a randomised trial to get your therapy disseminated, but in reality your clinical experience already showed you that the therapy works. How could you do a trial in order to optimise the chance of finding a positive effect?
  
  
  RESULTS
  Methods that can help include a strong allegiance towards the therapy, anything that increases expectations and hope in participants, making use of the weak spots of randomised trials (risk of bias), small sample sizes and waiting list control groups (but not comparisons with existing interventions). And if all that fails one can always not publish the outcomes and wait for positive trials.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Several methods are available to help you show that your therapy is effective, even when it is not.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology,VU University Amsterdam,The Netherlands.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Cuijpers
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy,Babeş-Bolyai University,Cluj-Napoca,Romania.
authors.forename: I A
authors.initials: IA
authors.lastname: Cristea
keywords: Control groups; randomised trial; researcher allegiance; risk of bias