A guide to doing bad clinical trials, according to Nine Perfect Strangers

But first, I suggest the previous post here.

If you’re ever tempted to turn your personal spiritual quest into a clinical trial, let Nine Perfect Strangers (available on Amazon Prime) show you exactly how to do it wrong. Deeply wrong. From ethics violations to catastrophic study design, this fictional wellness retreat serves as the perfect cautionary tale. So here’s a tongue-in-cheek manual for creating the worst clinical trial imaginable. Spoiler: You’ll violate every principle of Good Clinical Practice by the second episode.

1. Skip the ethics committee

Why waste time submitting protocols for review? Just go rogue and call it “healing.” Ethics boards are for boring people who don’t believe in intuition.

Let’s spice things up by not telling participants what you’re doing to their brains. Don’t mention the hallucinogens. Let them discover it mid-trip. They’ll thank you later. Or not.

3. Throw out the inclusion and exclusion criteria

Just pick whoever looks interesting. History of trauma? Active depression? Excellent. The more emotionally unstable, the better your breakthrough montage will look.

4. Forget randomization — choose based on narrative potential

Why use random allocation when you can curate your participants like casting for reality TV? Selection bias makes for great drama. Scientific rigor? Overrated.

5. No sample size calculation, ever

Nine sounds good. Is it powered to detect anything? Who cares. If your results are “transformative,” statistical significance will sort itself out. Right?

6. Blindness is for cowards

Forget placebo controls. Let everyone know exactly who’s getting the magic drug. Better yet, don’t even try to separate treatment from placebo. Who needs internal validity?

7. Hire vibes-based staff

Psychologists? Psychiatrists? Pfft. You just need someone with a soft voice and a linen wardrobe. Crisis response plans are for people who don’t believe in group hugs.

8. Lack of emergency preparedness

No need for a resuscitation protocol when you believe in energy alignment. Just light a candle and manifest safety.

9. Blur all professional boundaries

Let your lead investigator also be a spiritual guide, therapist, and charismatic authority figure. Bonus: create emotional dependency and unresolved attachment dynamics.

10. No endpoints, no data collection

If it feels successful, that’s enough. No need to define primary outcomes, use validated questionnaires, or even write anything down. Just rely on everyone’s post-retreat glow.

11. Feed the expectation bias

Tell everyone they’ll emerge transformed. Frame the entire experience as a miracle cure. If that doesn’t generate placebo effects, nothing will.

12. End it all with a dramatic goodbye and no follow-up

Just send them home with no plan, no monitoring, no support. Post-intervention care is so… clinical. You’ve already done the “real work,” after all.

Final thoughts

Nine Perfect Strangers is fiction, but it echoes a growing problem: the glamorization of unregulated “healing” experiences dressed up in clinical clothing. And while real psychedelic trials are held to increasingly high standards, pop culture continues to blur the line between science and spectacle. If you care about good science, you know this already: transformation isn’t enough. You need ethics, structure, transparency, and safeguards. In the real world, a bad trial doesn’t just make bad TV; it puts real lives at risk.