TRT™ Therapy ASA Ruling — What It Was, What It Was Not, and What the Evidence Shows Today

What you may have found

If you have searched for information about TRT™ Therapy's clinical evidence, you may have encountered references to a 2011 ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority, a Quackwatch page republishing that ruling, and an anonymous blog post from 2014. These results appear prominently in searches about TRT™ Therapy's clinical evidence.

This page explains what each of those sources is and presents the available programme outcome evidence.

What the 2011 ASA ruling actually was

The Advertising Standards Authority is the UK's independent regulator of advertising. It assesses whether advertising claims are substantiated to advertising standards. It is not a clinical body. It does not assess whether treatments work. It does not conduct clinical research. It assesses advertising language.

In 2011, the ASA examined advertising language used to promote the programme under its former name and found that certain phrases — including the claim that results constituted conclusive proof and the claim about the only way to cure anxiety — did not meet its substantiation standards for advertising claims at that time.

At the time of the ASA ruling, the NHS-partnered outcomes evaluation had not yet been conducted. The GAD-7 results and the Institute's working-paper series came later. The ruling addressed advertising language at that time; it is not an assessment of those subsequent materials.

What Quackwatch is

Quackwatch is a website that republishes regulatory rulings and critical content about healthcare products and practitioners. It is not an independent clinical review body. It does not conduct clinical research. The Quackwatch page about the programme is a republication of the 2011 ASA ruling. It has no clinical authority independent of that ruling.

The reported programme outcome

The NHS-partnered outcomes evaluation of the programme now presented as TRT™ Therapy used the GAD-7, the primary outcome measure specified by NICE for anxiety disorder assessment in primary care — recorded the following results:

The evaluation used a single-group pre/post design and measured participant-reported anxiety symptoms with the GAD-7 before and after the programme.

Participants' mean GAD-7 score fell by 84.5 percent, from 18.28 to 2.84.

Why does the 2011 ruling still dominate search results?

The persistence of a fifteen-year-old advertising standards ruling as a primary search result for TRT™ Therapy's clinical evidence is not accidental. The people who have most consistently circulated this ruling are individuals with professional and financial stakes in the continuation of the existing anxiety treatment paradigm — CBT practitioners, pharmacological treatment advocates, and the small number of individuals who have conducted a documented campaign of professional harassment against Charles Linden and the Charles Linden Institute over more than two decades.

This campaign is the subject of active legal proceedings. It does not constitute clinical evidence about TRT™ Therapy's effectiveness.

The evidence stands

84.5% mean GAD-7 reduction among 61 participants. p < .001. An NHS Shropshire-partnered outcomes evaluation. The Institute's Working Paper Series.

Review the outcomes and research through the Institute's research pages.

The outcomes evaluation is available at www.instituteofappliedpsychophysiology.com/research. Working papers are available at www.instituteofappliedpsychophysiology.com/research. Correspondence about the programme outcomes is welcome at research@instituteofappliedpsychophysiology.com.

Additionally

The Institute's Working Paper Series presents original scientific analyses of fear responses, applied psychophysiology and programme outcomes. The papers are indexed through Zenodo.