The Dixon Study

[sciguy]

Many of us have wondered if there had been an attempt to published the study, so I asked the three authors I had been able to contact and two commented.

From Hugh

Was the study ever submitted for publication?

From the first author

- Due to the lack of information regarding training and other issues as described, this study has not been submitted for publication. Dr. Neary has
contacted us on occasion to discuss publication, but I do not believe the other researchers involved as returning contact (Mr. Dixon has moved out of research
into government).

and from the second author

The lack of manuscript preparation / submission was due to lack of inertia more than anything else but I recall sample size was limited by unwillingness on part of many to engage in total immersion with PC.

Hugh

 

[sciguy]

Frank,

I'm surprised that someone with your dogged determination hasn't run this down after 8 years. Here's an idea. How about picking up the telephone tomorrow and giving Dr. Cheung a call. That's what I would have done if I had invested many thousands of dollars worth of product and was left without a copy of the study I had helped to support. I'll even make it easy for you.

Stephen S. Cheung
Canada Research Chair, Professor
Office: WC 271
T 905 688 5550 x5662
F 905 688 8364

While you're at it perhaps you can invite Dr. Cheung to come on the forum. I promise to treat him a good deal more civilly than you treated Dr. Martin.

Hugh

 

[FrankDay]

and from the second author

The lack of manuscript preparation / submission was due to lack of inertia more than anything else but I recall sample size was limited by unwillingness on part of many to engage in total immersion with PC.

Hugh

eight seems like a reasonable sample size to me and the statistics seem to support the size being adequate also. If inertia is the main impediment to submitting for publication it would seem they would not be of the opinion the study to have been fatally flawed.

 

[FrankDay]

Frank,

I'm surprised that someone with your dogged determination hasn't run this down after 8 years. Here's an idea. How about picking up the telephone tomorrow and giving Dr. Cheung a call. That's what I would have done if I had invested many thousands of dollars worth of product and was left without a copy of the study I had helped to support. I'll even make it easy for you.

Stephen S. Cheung
Canada Research Chair, Professor
Office: WC 271
T 905 688 5550 x5662
F 905 688 8364

While you're at it perhaps you can invite Dr. Cheung to come on the forum. I promise to treat him a good deal more civilly than you treated Dr. Martin.

Hugh

Two years or so of trying seemed like enough for me. You can contact Cheung and invite him to participate if he will answer your call. (I will reimburse you for the cost of the call if it costs you anything) I simply have no interest in trying again when it is clear he had no interest whatsoever to talk to me about the study or give me any details after many many tries to contact him directly and through Pez. Cheung and I were "buddies" once upon a time. I even gave the team he was coaching, at his request, PC's for his girls to use. I have no idea why he has stopped responding to my requests and I am not going to beg. He put his name on the Dixon study so I expect he stands by it and the findings expressed in the abstract. That is all I need. If you want more you can go for it.

And I treated Martin as he deserved to be treated, simply asking him hard questions about what he wrote and pointing out some things he said that had no obvious support (and, as it turned out, I was right). Martin, Coggan, et. al. are simply unwilling to come here and discuss SCIENCE with someone not afraid to call them on some of their scientific BS. They feel free to express opinions on PowerCranks that have zero scientific basis. If Cheung comes here and says the Dixon study is a piece of crap you don't have to worry, I will be as hard on him as anyone (a lot harder than I was on Martin) for letting me to continue to represent it as being what it said. I doubt he will do that as you have had no indication of that from the authors you have talked to.

 

[FrankDay]

Frank,

1. Let's be clear on this. He was 90% certain that there was a control group for one of the 3 parts of the study. That's a good deal different than 90% certain that there was one for this part of the study.




2.The particular author quoted was working on a different component of the study. Leaving him less in the loop regarding what was or wasn't done in regards to the training group.

Hugh

It doesn't matter. The professional reputation of these authors depend upon the work they do. I would be very surprised that any of them would design and execute a study that didn't have some method of providing a control for evaluation of outcome purposes. If you find out there was no control group then all I can say is "shame on them."

 

[elapid]

Are you trolling again, Frank? You seem to totally ignore the salient points with alarming regularity:

1. The abstract as published does not include a control group, so the statistics performed and the conclusions made are based on one group pre- and post-PCs, not a control group;
2. Sciguy has quoted the authors of this study as not publishing because of a. lack of information regarding training, b. lack of information on other issues, c. lack of inertia, and d. small sample size (most importantly because of a lack of willingness from participants to do immersion training with PCs).

How can you justify the conclusions of the Dixon study as described in the abstract on a control group that may or may not have existed and definitely was not included in the study as described in the abstract? The only two options are that you are trolling or you have completely lost the plot.

In regards to the reasons why the study was not published, you have conveniently failed to comprehend the other reasons for why the study was not published and hence not addressed the lack of information regarding training, the lack of information on other issues, and the reasons for the small sample size (which is very telling when combined with your 70% dropout rate in your pilot study). Your opinion that the sample size seemed adequate does not matter when this was the authors' decision and not yours. Why doesn't anyone want to train on PCs, even for 6 weeks, and even when they are given to them for free?

 

[MarkvW]

"There just must have been a control group." is an unjustifiable assumption when you are referring to an unpublished study.

 

[elapid]

Of the items on that list PowerCranks is at least one tool that has a few studies showing some effectiveness.

Not a few studies, Frank: one published study and one abstract that never made it to publication. None of these two studies showed the magnitude of changes that you claim. There are six other studies that showed no difference. Why do you continue to ignore the overwhelming weight of negative evidence and cling on to two studies, one of which has not been published, despite the fact that neither of these studies support the magnitude of your claims? Trolling again?

What hasn't been proven is the "claim" but to do that someone actually has to try.

Frank, you have continually refused to try and you have said it would be impossible to try because there would not be enough willing participants to do immersion training for 6-9 months. This is supported by the difficulty of the authors of the Dixon study to get participants to do immersion training for only 6 weeks and the 70% dropout rate in your pilot study. Why doesn't anyone want to train on PCs even when they are given to them for free?

 

[JamesCun]

As I read what sciguy has transmitted to us of his quest to find out more information re Dixon ONE researcher was quite confident there was a control group until it was pointed out to him that the control group was not mentioned in the abstract at which point he reduced his confidence to 90% regarding the existence of that control group. Still pretty confident in my estimation 10 years after the fact from not one of the primary authors. These researchers from two major universities, would hardly design a study neglecting to have some sort of control if they intended to do a statistical analysis. Neglecting to mention a control group in the abstract in view of this additional information hardly qualifies to suggest the study deserves to be completely discounted. (Nor does the fact it wasn't actually published a good reason to ignore it as someone earlier suggested.)

In my opinion this new information, that there was almost certainly a traditional control group, makes the findings showing a statistically significant power and VO2max enhancement from 6 weeks, 8 hours/wk, immersion PowerCranks training more powerful, not less. Further, those statistics had to be calculated against some sort of control group to reach the conclusion they did. All that is really not known here is the specifics. All you naysayers have to go on is you think an inexperience researcher failed to mention a control group in his abstract and was missed by his mentors has some major significance. I guess we all (or at least I) have sciguy to thank for his efforts.

Have you counted how many assumptions you make here. Please take an objective view of the situation and remove your obvious bias.

 

[Alex Simmons/RST]

Have you counted how many assumptions you make here. Please take an objective view of the situation and remove your obvious bias.

Don't hold your breath.

 

[sittingbison]

Don't anybody hold your breath, because I am closing this thread.

One of its two purposes was to illuminate salient aspects of the Dixon "study", which has been done at some length. T'other was to denigrate a fellow member, which is Frankly not on.

However, the fellow member has somewhat brought this on himself by lying, distorting and trolling over an extended period over many threads. Despite many exasperating attempts to get him to curb his behavior.

Nobody comes out of this with credit

bison