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<div class="span-body"><div class="timestamp updated" title="2012-05-18T1741Z">May 18, 5:41 PM EDT</div></div><br>
<p class="body"><font size="6"><b><span class="headline entry-title">Researcher apologizes for study of gay therapy </span></b></font>
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<span class="byline">By <span class="author vcard"><span class="fn">MALCOLM RITTER </span></span></span><br>
<span class="bylinetitle">AP Science Writer</span></p></div></td></tr>
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<span class="entry-content"><p class="ap-story-p"> NEW YORK (AP)
-- A prominent retired psychiatrist is apologizing to the gay community
for a decade-old study that concluded some gay people can go straight
through what's called reparative therapy.</p> <p class="ap-story-p">Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, formerly of Columbia University, now says he no longer believes his work showed that.</p> <p class="ap-story-p">For
the study, Spitzer had interviewed 200 people who'd claimed some degree
of change. The "fatal flaw" is that there is no way to judge the
credibility of their accounts, Spitzer says in a letter he submitted
last month to a journal that published his work in 2003.</p> <p class="ap-story-p">The
work made headlines when he presented it at a 2001 meeting of the
American Psychiatric Association. One reason for the attention was that
Spitzer had played a leading role 30 years before in removing
homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in the association's
diagnostic manual.</p> <p class="ap-story-p">Spitzer's study was
attacked by critics who questioned the reliability of the accounts from
the people he interviewed. At the time, Spitzer acknowledged that he had
no proof their stories were accurate, but said several aspects of their
accounts suggested their statements could not be dismissed out of hand.</p> <p class="ap-story-p">Now
he says his reasoning was wrong, and that "there was no way to
determine if the subject's accounts of change were valid," he wrote in a
letter to the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Spitzer, who
lives in Princeton, N.J., sent a copy to The Associated Press after a
reporter interviewed him about his change of heart.</p> <p class="ap-story-p">"I
believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven
claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy," Spitzer wrote. "I also
apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some
form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that
reparative therapy works with some `highly motivated' individuals."</p></span></div>
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