BBC: Long Covid course [LP] is ‘exploiting people’, says ex-GB rower, 2024, article and radio program

My thoughts exactly. It's a very damning piece all-in-all.

 

Rachel Schraer’s Profile | BBC Journalist | Muck Rack

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Rachel Schraer
@rachelschraer
4 days ago
And if you have any tip-offs or stories I should be investigating - any wrongdoing that needs digging into and expo… https://t.co/a2SB3xggTO

 

Tweeted some quotes from the article and radio-program:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1792906971860828360


1) “Being in those kinds of thoughts is what’s maintaining your symptoms.”

The BBC did an investigation into the Lightning Process, a controversial 3-day training program.

This is what that ME/CFS patient community had to deal with for years.

2) Journalist Sarah Schraer:

“Not only did my coach say my thoughts were maintaining my symptoms, she also told me quite explicitly that there was nothing physical wrong with my body, that’s despite having no apparent medical qualification or requesting access to any test results.”

3) “One of the most scientifically shaky claims we found Lightning Process coaches make is that using negative words can trigger symptoms and using positive language teaches the brain to experience positive sensations.”

4) The Lightning process tells patients that thinking and speaking positively, will help cure them of illnesses such as ME/CFS or Long Covid.

They are instructed to tell themselves out loud: ‘You are a powerful genius’

5) Neuroscientist Camilla Nord: “I’m afraid now we’ve strayed very, very far from neuroscience. What I would call neuro-bollocks. It’s a kind of abusive of neuroscientific terms in order to give quite simple psychological techniques a kind of sheen of science about them.”

6) Lightning process practitioners have an aggressive way of promoting themselves.

Oonagh Cousins, an Olympic rower who developed Long Covid, was contacted and offered a free place on the program.

7) Oonagh: “I think they were hoping I would have a positive experience and use my athlete platform to advertise it to this new patient cohort that appearing as a result of the pandemic.”

8) The BBC article also said:

'When we put these specific claims to Dr Parker, he said our questions seemed to be "informed solely by the rumours and misinformation" circulated by what he called "anti-recovery activists".'

 

File on 4 - Long Covid: Mind Over Matter? - BBC Sounds

24:20

 

Unfortunately this is by far the biggest problem here: it's not. This is now accepted modern neuroscience and health care. It's 100% pseudoscience, but a huge number of neurologists and other MDs, as well as psychiatrists and psychologists, essentially say the same things with the same intent and purpose. Things such as:

There is no basis for this here, but it's mainstream medicine. At best it's a generic claim that has nothing to do with the specifics here, but the way this ideology is built guarantees that this is the outcome. It's essentially the same argument as saying that since the Sun influences all life on Earth, then astrology is real. This is nonsense, it's not how any of this works. But for decades the standard has been that if it's merely possible that a psychological disorder could explain, then it does. You build on nonsense, you get nonsense.

There is basically no difference between LP and CBT:

This is basically the gist of the biopsychosocial model of "deconditioning" and "false illness beliefs" that has been promoted to MDs all over the world. It's why CBT is part of the package. Or the switch. Or mindfulness. Or mind-body-this-and-that.

Yes, LP is a scam. A blatant exploitative scam that preys on vulnerable people, as vile as the people who scam old people out of their savings. And so is the entire psychosomatic ideology as it relates to chronic illness. It's the exact same thing. Which all makes it much harder to criticize because all the flaws in the LP model are the exact same flaws as the mindfulness/rehabilitation approach. They even both talk about "calming the nervous system" and other woo nonsense. Might as well as some stuff about cleaning auras while they're at it.

This is what happens when you integrate pseudoscience into a scientific profession: you destroy the credibility of that profession. No one involved can claim they don't understand this, charlatanism has always existed when it comes to health, and now that it has been integrated into professional health care it becomes impossible to shoo the pseudoscience away, it walks and talks exactly like card-carrying MDs.

You made your bed, now undo the hell out of it and take full responsibility for all the harm you did, as real professionals do.

Edit: As I said:

 

What about from people who are medically qualified? Saying the exact same thing? Publishing research saying the exact same thing? Clinically advising the exact same thing? With the same intent and purpose? Officially? With consequences, for insurance and disability? Valid expert opinion in a court of law?

What about then? Because the "carefully managed" bit is complete red herring. There is no such thing, it makes absolutely no difference and may as well say that it's "supervised by Santa Claus". Comments like this actually show how significant the problem is, because they give weight to the same lie using different words. This is exactly what the PACE-type ideologues have been saying for years, with the same intent and purpose. They keep using the No true Scotsman fallacy and almost no one cares, it's an accepted fallacy here.

What's worse is that it's written explicitly in those terms. This "asking patients to exercise just on the idea that they've changed their mindset about it" is exactly the premise of PACE, and PACE is the foundation of the entire treatment model. The problem isn't just LP, it's the profession that has lost its way. Even the worrying about symptoms is core to the official CBT+GET model, and to the generic psychosomatic rehabilitation model.

Actually there is a way to read this that basically means that doing LP is problematic, but doing CBT+GET is fine, even though they're basically the same thing. Which is basically one expert criticizing pseudoscience on some basis, who then promotes the same pseudoscience in the same sentence, even though it features the same problems. This destroys trust in experts. How can anyone trust experts when they hear stuff like this about things they can intuitively know are BS?!

 

Indeed some of these CBT/GET true believers, such as Prof Crawley explicitly support LP, and their supposed scientific supporting evidence uses the same flawed experimental design used to justify LP.

 

lol in radio programme - only managed the 1st 30 mins or so....
Prof Nord says

"I'm afraid now we've strayed very very far from neuroscience, <laughs> its what i would call 'neurobollocks' a kind of abuse of neuroscientific terms"

fantastic

this has been a good week for funny terms "biopsychosauruses" - (was that you @Barry? & now 'neurobollocks'

Edited: i'd mistakenly said Dr Cambridge when i meant the dr *from* Cambridge, i believe her name was Prof Nord... honestly if you're going to quote someone Jem the least you can do is get there name right! my brain is all over the place, thinking through treacle

 

One of the people interviewed in favor of the LP by the BBC is Rachel Whitfield, a LP practitioner who was a NLP coach before who has infiltrated, and has been banned from, several Long Covid groups to promote the LP, is a member of COFFI.

Thread on COFFI here: https://www.s4me.info/threads/coffi...e-following-infection.2013/page-5#post-533555.

 

"This makes them sound like a lifestyle cult"

Ha ha brilliant

 

Fabulous

 

neurobollocks would be a fabulous term for fnd

 

I haven't yet listened to the whole thing - I used my day's quota of energy reading the MEA post - but my concern is that for such a mendacious huckster as Parker, any publicity is good publicity. I had hoped someone would dig into his background as a tarot-card-reading faith healer: there's probably another news story in there.

What really galls me, however, is the way that organisations and institutions that should seek to serve, not harm, the public have wilfully supported and enabled him. Not just Crawley and the Scottish NHS trust mentioned, but the London Met - admittedly a third-rate institution - who allowed him to inflict his bilge on a group of drug addicts and gave him a PhD for it, and the Government, who could quite easily crack down on the proliferation of such obviously detrimental pseudoscience but choose to allow it to flourish.

(He's not the only grifter with a PhD, either; Perrin got one from another third-rate institution - the University of Salford - for his "lymphatic drainage" gibberish. The commercialisation and diminution of standards in academia and the proliferation of universities that began in the 1990s has led to some very strange outcomes.)

 

Claiming to be able to do do 30 mph in a bike for 20 minutes with a peak heart rate of 150 is complete BS.

Apparently the lightning process instantly turned her into an elite cyclist with superhuman physiology. Why bother training years .

 

@Hutan that is intriguing about Rachel Whitfield being the LP recovered person.

I was not aware of her previously but on listening to her in the interview my immediate thought was that she was not credible at all. She came across as someone who is highly suggestible and that she probably did not really have LC, but did have health anxiety. Likewise, her LP recovery story was so over the top that it did not ring true.
At the time I thought Rachel Schraer must have selected the loopiest person to include so that most listeners would question their credibility.

I admit to being of an overly optimistic disposition - but I can’t see this story being of any benefit to LP. It very clearly pitches it as a dubious scam.

 

Karen from Physios for ME on X

https://twitter.com/user/status/1792803060219367705


A new term used in defense of this process is "anti-recovery activists" which is the most bizarre interpretation of "people trying to educate so health professionals don't harm their patients".

It's about time this exploitative program is called out

 

The next day she did a 5 km run. Something that normally takes a few weeks when starting from scratch. Not walking 5 km, a 5 km run. She probably was scuba diving the week before that.

But yeah that journalist comes off as very gullible and has done a poor job given the stakes.

I don't usually go there, but the description she gives sounds forced. It's very unusual to speak of this anxiety about symptoms from exertion that isn't the result of having experienced it before, which she doesn't describe.

I do occasionally see descriptions like this, but they are rare. It misunderstands pacing and I almost never see people talk about anxiety about exertion, in fact the overwhelming majority explicitly talk about the anxiety is strictly "body" anxiety, it has no corresponding thoughts. Not all, just the vast majority.

So, this looks to me a lot like Garner's story where details don't add up and appears to be cobbled together from misinterpreting what other patients are saying about it.

I'm not saying I think it's all fake, but it's a very unusual story, with details I almost never see organically in the LC community. It also just happens to exactly fit the stereotypes of the CBT/GET/LP model, almost like it comes straight from the corporate brochure, ready to sing the company anthem.