Yes, Binita is so engaging and so confident of her knowledge. She could be a great advocate.
But, so much of what she says is wrong.
Just one example:
35.00 On pacing:
"One of the sort of treatment strategies which is really really important alongside any drug therapy or anything else, is trying to manage that energy level. So you sort of stay outside your energy debt all the time. That's called pacing. And people have to learn how to do that very carefully. There's quite a lot of science behind it, how to do it properly. You can use things like heart rate monitors and HRV monitoring to help you."
No, there is not quite a lot of science behind it. Pacing is presented as a treatment, as a sacrifice that you make in order to be able to get your old life back. The interviewer (who also seems very lovely) refers to pacing as helping people recover ('of getting people back') and Binita nods in agreement, and says
'A very very detailed approach to pacing is super super important to recovery'.
Binita seems to think that she found someone in Germany who fixed her daughter, and she seems totally convinced that she is fixing people.
She has a holistic team to help people eat properly, breathe properly, sleep properly, be emotionally regulated 'to develop the landscape for health'. This is apparently a cornerstone to recovery. Some aspects of her model are similar to what we are suggesting, but some aspects are definitely similar to the rehabilitation clinics that we are rejecting. Complying with her 'very very detailed approach to pacing' and the living of an exemplary healthy life sounds utterly exhausting and very demoralising.
She actually seems very similar to Esther Crawley to me - charismatic, convincing, well-meaning and, to a large extent, wrong. That won't be a popular view, when someone is clearly working hard and no doubt is highly appreciated by her patients.
So many doctors seem programmed to believe that they have the answers, regardless of whether they do or not. I don't think any specialists attracted to this field are going to be happy saying 'we don't know and we have no treatments'. It seems as though we just have to put up with these doctors peddling quackery while we wait for research to slowly find some actually effective treatments.
