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

Good to see that Long Covid is clearly not due to deconditioning then.

 

'neurobollocks' High five to Prof Nord. I hope that word makes it into the Oxford dictionary this year!

This is basically 'mindfulness' in a CFS/ME Clinic in 2011 in the South West, but without the A3 sheet of paper. You can see now why Crawley did the Lightening Process study, the fact that she was funded for it points to a policy of denial of clinical investigations and denial of healthcare dating all the way back to the opening of these CFS/ME clinics and beyond. How much harm has that caused since 2002, at the very least?

untitled (meresearch.org.uk) Breakthrough newsletter from 2008

 

NHS Centre for Integrative Care - NHSGGC concentrates on integrated care for long term conditions, which of course includes ME/CFS

Under the tab Mindfulness and Meditation you'll find the only scan we'll ever receive. I can't even spare the energy to look up what 'Mistletoe Therapy' is.

 

Didn’t the LP people also claim LP was being ‘used’ under the NHS banner somewhere in the English Midlands, though I don’t think it was established where or in what circumstance?

 

Ridicule is an awfully powerful weapon against people who claim the ridiculous and are reliant on faith. I'm definitely gonna keep using these two terms. I saw a third one somewhere in this thread but have forgotten what it was.

There are so many angles you could ridicule them from.

 

I thought the program was good. Phil Parker came across as a paranoid conspiracy theorist (or at least trying to appeal to that demographic) with his 'anti-recovery activists' line. I'm very grateful to Oonagh for speaking out.

I wondered if the program could have drawn attention to the way that encouraging people to speak as though they are better (using positive language) creates significant difficulty when it comes to discerning the effectiveness of the program. People are effectively being coached to say they're well in order to be well; so if you ask them if they're well, and they want to be well, they may say that they're well, even if they're not.

I don't know about the LP but other similar programs encourage people to share their 'recovery story' as a step towards healing, as though the act of sharing a recovery story will itself lead to further recovery (handily also providing free PR for the company). I think people want to be liked and part of the 'recovery gang' and to be a 'good participant'. There's also often a heavy push for people to train as 'coaches' themselves which appears a great option for many who have been unable to work because of illness because it's flexible, work from home, doesn't require any qualifications. But of course you need to have recovered yourself to be a coach so you have to share your recovery story, even if you're not actually fully recovered. (Then you pay the company extra money to train as a 'coach' so good for them all round.)

But there probably wasn't time to include all of that in the program. And maybe elements were there for listeners to notice. Also, I guess they can't undermine the statements of the participants on the program. That one woman who'd had LC for a relatively short time, and had been able to walk inside her house but not outside, definitely seemed to have been helped. Whether or not she still had LC at the point at which she did the LP, we'll never know.

 

It's quite telling that she said that as if it meant LC is all in the mind, whereas if you have fatigue/pain + dyautonomia + brainfog then of course it's easier to walk around in a familiar space with short distances between easily accessible resting spots than it is to walk outside where there are fewer or none of those things.

 

It used to be the homeopathy hospital ......

 

I left a comment pointing out how the LP and similar 'brain retraining' programs are routinely promoted by MDs, and that it's largely identical to the CBT+GET model, making it impossible to criticize.

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