Not verboten. Truly dubious researchers will just tinker with the analysis to get the result they want without telling anyone what they've done, which absolute

Not verboten. Truly dubious researchers will just tinker with the analysis to get the result they want without telling anyone what they've done, which absolutely was not the case here. These researchers followed the accepted best practice of publishing their intended outcomes and analysis methods before starting the trial, which is laudable. The original paper used standard frequentist methods that are generally accepted by clinical journals, while their follow-up used more esoteric (and arguably more advanced) Bayesian methods. The decision to publish the re-analysis was justified, they were completely transparent about it, it doesn't reflect badly on their professionalism or integrity in any way whatsoever, but it does slightly smack of desperation. Similarly, some of the authors of that paper subsequently published a paper criticising the validity of the main outcome measure they used, the QIDS-SR-16. The points they make are perfectly reasonable, the paper is informative, it's entirely plausible that they only lost confidence in the instrument because of what they learned from the trial, but it does seem a tiny bit desperate to be making those arguments after the fact. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37122239/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37122239/ To be absolutely clear, the team at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at ICL are good guys. They're serious, they do all the right things in terms of research integrity and they clearly care deeply about patients. They worked through a dreadful mire of legal and bureaucratic barriers to get psychedelic research done on a meaningful scale. Nutt and Carhart-Harris and others are absolutely passionate about this area of research, and I just hope that they can find a way through if this disappointing finding proves to be the beginning of a dead-end.