Anyone know of any stories of people with Long Covid who were made worse by the Lightning Process, Gupta or similar?

Anyone know of any stories of people with #LongCovid who were made worse by the Lightning Process? A journalist is looking at this issue. I shared with them some stories of people with ME/CFS in this scenario.

 

This journalist has also now told me they would be interested in hearing of people with #LongCovid made worse by other programs that are somewhat similar e.g. Gupta. I talked to them for 20 minutes yesterday. An interesting & important project

 

In case of interest, I sent the journalist the following with regard to people with ME/CFS:


People made worse with Lightning Process with working links:



(i) MESci @mecfsscience


Feb 19, 2016

Replying to

@AnilvanderZee

@AnilvanderZee

@DrSpeedyandME

The Lightning Process is what took me from being moderately affected to severe (housebound).



https://twitter.com/user/status/700825018423386113




(ii) Nicole O'Donovan Hickey

I made a complaint too! I also asked for my money back I did everything they asked and it only made me sicker! They refused my refund! I explained how sick I was and said I deserved my money back and they offered me a free podcast that was it. It's disgraceful praying on poor vulnerable people who will do anything to get better. They make promises that you will and when you don't they don't want to know about it. So glad to hear about this new paper coming out.






(iii) Joan McParland MBE [Joan recently got an MBE for her charity work for ME. She can be contacted at XXXXXXXXXXXX ]



Do not, underestimate the power of NLP as even I, became almost evangelical about LP for a few weeks until the euphoria started to wear off and any adrenal fuelled energy abruptly ended. The disappointment was horrendous and during the resulting relapse from all that ‘living the life I loved’ I’d done, I felt like a fraud and a liar and for the first time during that first decade since ME onset, I felt depressed and even more hopeless. I felt guilty for wasting the large amount of money too.
Without the support of my family, I honestly don’t know how I would gotten through the months of the whole crazy LP experience.

Anyway, after I had chastised myself enough for being so stupid I became very determined to speak out about this disease, so in a way, I can thank LP for being the very shove I needed and one of the main reasons I started the charity.

https://virology.ws/2019/08/21/trial-by-error-joan-mcparlands-lightning-process-experience/





(iv) Natalie Boulton

Joan Mcparland Can I post your account on the Voices from the Shadows page please? I am horrified by the Guardian's report I've just looked at. It is going to result in harming more children and young people who are so vulnerable to suggestion and desperate to get better and willing to trust and take risks. My daughter was utterly deceived by the promises and excitement and as I said before, harmed both physically and more worryingly psychologically traumatised. When she contributed to an AfME article on LP her story was totally distorted. When she complained to AYME with a group of other young people the rational for AYMEs support of LP was that if just one person was helped they had a duty to support it, - but obviously not to take into account all those who were harmed - and we know of many. This is further evidence that Crawley is incapable of accurately selecting patients with ME/CFS for her studies and can not be trusted with patient selection for MEGA - no matter how good some of the speakers at the CMRC are. I took a complaint about the LP trial with a copy of Lost Voices, by hand, to the ethics committee at Bristol University - to no avail as it was the Hospital Ethics committee who passed this!

https://www.facebook.com/TomKindlonMECFS/posts/pfbid02r7yPTZ2uzR4zRcfd36WoUF4tbH1TLp8GapczFT8etbpR8b66So9euhpDqpb3p6WTl?comment_id=901089030039223&reply_comment_id=901811569966969&__cft__[0]=AZXQD7sk6XIWcCqTQLugh4uVPPZBsKAfaZ7uL18O9ef-1PhoUEkt9V9Ep1uX3Sww660v3tCLp987Yre_U-QzRBy2mB8lG3T7P4PkNsFw6U1wU5T8OrXGehA630vGRUNTbVQ&__tn__=R]-R


(v) When you beckon lightning and invite it in for tea

https://www.jkrowbory.co.uk/2017/09/when-you-beckon-lightning-and-invite-it-in-for-tea/


20 September 2017

By February 2007, I had been receiving daily Nexavir injections (an antiviral) for six months and I was actually starting to see small improvements in my health for the first time in over two years of being acutely ill. But friends and relatives kept sending me newspaper cuttings of articles about the Lightning Process (LP) curing people with ME. I became under enormous pressure to do the LP (“What’s the harm in trying it?” “Don’t you want to get better?” “It has helped others so it’s worth a shot”). I was only 20 years old, vulnerable because of my desperation to get better, and didn’t know much about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and what the illness actually was (a multi-systemic, neuroimmune illness). By that time, I also had been gaslighted by so many NHS doctors and private doctors about my illness and symptoms, that I was doubting myself. When so many people disbelieve you, you start disbelieving yourself, despite all physical evidence to the contrary. In the end, I buckled and, although sceptical, I agreed to do the LP. I was so ill and I just wanted to get better.

Ironically, I wouldn’t have even been able to get to the LP practitioner’s house (he was an NHS doctor but did the LP privately) even a couple of months previously but because of the small improvements due to the Nexavir injections, I was able to get down the stairs and lie down in the back of our car to get there. There were consequences for my body but I thought that it would be worth it.

I’m not going to go into detail about the “mechanics” of the LP; other people have debunked the methods far better than I’m currently able to. Back then, I decided to throw myself into the LP and be totally committed to doing it properly. The results, however, were nothing less than disastrous for me.

First, the fully-qualified practitioner artfully gaslighted us (a group of four patients) with what I now know is pseudoscience quackery about M.E.; it was done in such a subtle, convincing and skilful way (even experienced scientists have been taken in by it). Using “science” to explain, he told us how we didn’t ‘have’ an illness but that we were ‘doing’ an illness; it was our thoughts, behaviours, and fears about post-exertional symptoms that were causing us to stop ourselves from living normally and causing us to believe that we had symptoms and to believe that we were ill.

He then put mechanisms into place in my brain, via neuro-linguistic programming, that made my own brain automatically gaslight me constantly and stop any thoughts of symptoms dead in their tracks. He added repetitive gestures/movements/phrases that I had to continually apply to my thoughts and body in order to reinforce the programming. This is brainwashing.

It’s hard to describe being brainwashed. The next six months in 2007 after the LP are still a hazy blur to me. Not only did the neuro-linguistic programming in my brain not allow me to ever mention any symptoms to anyone, I was not even allowed to think that I had any symptoms. I wasn’t allowed to be ill anymore. I pushed and pushed myself, even when in the most excruciating pain, even when I was in heart failure or experiencing seizures or passing out, because they didn’t exist. My illness didn’t exist [even though I was extremely ill, I honestly believed that I wasn’t ill anymore, that I was cured]. It sounds ridiculously idiotic but that’s what brainwashing can do. My body was becoming more and more damaged from the enforced gradual Graded Exercise Therapy that the programming in my brain was imposing on myself. It was completely out of my control; I felt glazed over and not with it.

As per what I’d been conditioned and instructed to do during the LP training, I told everyone that I was no longer ill and that I was recovering. I’m pretty sure that I told all my friends and family that I was in recovery, that the Lightning Process had been successful and had worked. I even had a huge 21st birthday/’I’m better now’ party in a village hall, celebrating recovery from illness. Remembering it now is upsetting. I had the biggest smile on my face the whole time and looked fine to everyone but would have to frequently escape into the toilets where I would almost black out and would collapse on the floor for a while. I was in oxygen starvation from being upright and from heart failure. I was very dizzy and everything was spinning around me because of my very low blood pressure. All my muscles were screaming at me. Nobody had any idea that this was happening to me; the LP programming prevented me from being able to tell anyone or from even acknowledging my symptoms to myself. They didn’t exist because I wasn’t ill. It’s just a haze to me now.

In the following months, I kept on pushing myself, doing insane damage to my body (I pushed myself to the point where I was going on a slow 5-minute walk every few days, which was a huge deal for me considering I had been bed-bound for two years) until one day in August 2007, when my parents were away, I pushed myself too far and went on a longer walk. At the end, my body failed and packed in completely; the six months caught up with me and I collapsed. I was never able to get up again. Ever since, I have been bed-bound, unable to sit up and unable to speak, struggling to breathe and swallow. The permanent organ damage that was done during March to August 2007 during the self-imposed GET due to the LP brainwashing, was devastating. I never recovered from it and my health has only deteriorated since. The hold that the brainwashing had over me was broken pretty quickly and thoroughly that August, thank goodness. But I can’t remember much from those six months.

Today it is being reported in the news that an experimental trial of the LP on children and teens with M.E. has been successful. The fact that the results are based on the children and teens themselves saying that they have recovered, is extremely worrying to me. During the six months that I was brainwashed with the LP, I would have said the same: that I was cured, that I was recovering and that the LP was successful. Those poor children. They are even more vulnerable than I was. What they have been subjected to is nothing short of abuse and should never have been allowed to happen in the first place.

Whatever you do, please don’t send news articles about the Lightning Process to anyone with M.E. It’s a dangerous thing. Don’t beckon lightning and invite it in for tea; it will burn your house to the ground with you inside until you’re nothing but ashes.

(vi)

Izzy Bennett



Made me very ill, bought into it and tried too hard to make it work for me.







(vii) https://www.meaction.net/2019/01/23...nd-positive-thinking-on-a-young-girl-with-me/

Six weeks later, Cherry came down with tonsillitis-like symptoms. Cherry’s mother said it had been clear that her daughter was fading quickly even as she worked so hard to overcome the disease by believing that she was, in fact, well. A few months later, in the autumn, Cherry started 6th Form for the second time. She came down with a cold, and never recovered, and from that point onwards became mainly housebound.

Cherry declined rapidly. She became too weak to leave her bedroom. She attempted to try the Lightning Process again, thinking that she just needed another refresher, but it made no difference. At this point, the Lightning Process practitioner gave up on Cherry, saying that she had some sort of “block” and couldn’t understand why this approach wasn’t working for her.

“Cherry was really angry and confused because they made it seem like it was her fault that she had not recovered,” said Cherry’s mum. “She was young. She felt confused because she had always put her heart and soul into everything. She can’t speak for herself now but she feels very angry at how the Lightning Process played with her mind and made her doubt herself.”

Four years after attempting to override her system with willful physical and mental exercise, Cherry, now 21 years old, spends 24-hours per day in a darkened room, 100 percent bed bound, too weak to speak or swallow, and surviving on a feeding tube.

“It seems innocuous – how can gentle exercise or good thoughts possibly be dangerous?” Cherry’s mum said. “The problem with the disease is that you can do massive damage to your body systems, but it often doesn’t show up until months later. In hindsight I believe that the hospital consultant should have told Cherry to take a year and rest and let her body heal.”

(viii)

 

The focus of their piece is long Covid. I think they would like to quote or ideally interview people with Long Covid.

ETA: I have passed it on now (the link did occur to me earlier this afternoon but I had an excuse to write to her again just now).

 

These stories need to be out there day and night and no one should be able to distribute the nonsense BPSM/LP/NLP/cfs-CBT or any other fake Smile type acronym to hide what’s pretty sinister underneath as a model and mode (and what I’m beginning to think just looks like a form of radicalism propaganda tbf and not even really even pretend pseudo med just bigotry to those who will get on board with it if persuaded right about others in a weak moment) without coming across these realities.

To call it anything other than brainwashing and requiring coercion as part of the method to get ‘claimed effects’ has always seemed a cheek and I’m bored of the farce of people somehow pretending there wasn’t always a massive ethics snd safeguarding issue.