Areas › Worry and anxiety › Treatment and medication
Saying that you do not know, and then showing where you would look, beats an answer improvised on the spot. It also teaches the person asking how to check things for themselves.
Name the limit, name the source you would go to, and offer to come back with what you find. Systematic reviews and an ordinary scholarly search will cover most questions of this kind. People rarely lose confidence in someone who says this. They lose it when the confident answer turns out to be wrong.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
You [people] can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know (Quran 16:43). Asking someone better placed is the instruction itself, which means not knowing was never the failure.
وَمَآ أَرۡسَلۡنَا مِن قَبۡلِكَ إِلَّا رِجَالࣰ ا نُّوحِيٓ إِلَيۡهِمۡۖ فَسۡـَٔلُوٓاْ أَهۡلَ ٱلذِّكۡرِ إِن كُنتُمۡ لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ
[Prophet], all the messengers We sent before you were simply men to whom We had given the Revelation: you [people] can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know
Qur’an 16:43read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Across 295 studies and more than thirty thousand patients, the quality of the working relationship between client and therapist predicted how well treatment went, whatever type of therapy was used. It is a consistent association rather than proof that the relationship causes the outcome. It does put honesty in the room on the side of the work rather than against it.
Flückiger C, Del Re AC, Wampold BE, Horvath AO. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis.. Psychotherapy (Chicago, Ill.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Admitting the edge of what you know keeps everything else you say trustworthy.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Ask what symptom you are aiming at rather than what the diagnosis is called. Nothing anyone takes recognises a category; it acts on whatever is happening in the body.
The number worth watching is not the dose but the direction. A dose that keeps creeping upward says something that a steady one does not.
A small dose that has not changed in years is not automatically something to fix. Stopping carries risks of its own, and they have to be weighed rather than assumed away.