Ahhh, excellent, thanks for clarifying the real world pitfalls of hypothesis testing for hifi, @Zapp. So I probably have to drop that proposal. What I want to get away from is the rationale “lack of apparent explanation plus perceived improvement equals delusion”. This is not the case as our minds and how they interact with our sense consciousnesses differ greatly.
I believe it to be good to permit complexity in research. Complex fields like the human mind don’t lend themselves well to reductionistic research. Same as nutrition. The human body is too complex. The reductionist paradigm is mechanical in nature and resorts to simple causality. To state that A causes B it has to be true that (1) A always precedes B (2) B always follows A (3) There is no C that could also cause B. Simple models of causation can lead to unexpected and unexplained findings. Reductionistic research uses prospective experiments and case control studies. In contrast a wholistic evidence source is observational research. Contemplative science or neuroscience are others.
I really like your Bayesian approach. It simplifies in an apparently valid way. We had a loosely related and less scientific thread here: