Lightning Process - discussion thread

Forbin said:
I don't know if this has been previously noted, but, apparently, the "Lightning Process" is now being advertised for Long Covid too.

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Just putting the youtube transcript of this in a quote box in case it's helpful for searching.
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you're probably watching this because
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you're suffering with long covered and
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you'd love to find some solutions but
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it's really not clear what might help
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then i think you're going to find this
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video really useful
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over the last few years the lightning
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process has helped hundreds of people
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with long covert to change their health
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and recover so what is the lightning
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process and how does it help people with
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long coving with long coved somehow it
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seems that the natural healing cycle
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that we rely on to get well has got
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stuck and we need to find a way to
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switch this back on
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the lightning process provides a range
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of easy to use tools
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based on the extensive research into how
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the brain affects the way the body works
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the seminar will teach you tools so you
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can utilize this ability
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of your brain to influence your health
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teaching you to switch on pathways that
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encourage health and switch off ones
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that are stopping you getting well
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and because the brain influences
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hormone production
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the way cells work the way your immune
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system works with these tools you can
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make a real difference to your health
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and so it's great for the core symptoms
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of long-covered such as fatigue muscle
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aches brain fog and so on
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using a range of brain training
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exercises including visualization
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meditation and changing your language
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you can set your brain in a new
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direction
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imagine the freedom and joy that comes
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from having your old self back again
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so you can once again choose how you
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live your life
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and feel back to your old self once
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again
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so join the thousands of people who
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already transformed their lives for the
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better
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and if you'd like to speak to one of our
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experts directly about this then just
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give us a call we'd love to chat it
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through with you
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you can find all the details you need at
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Since this article is largely a promotion of the Lightning Process, this post and subsequent discussion have been moved from the Long Covid in the media thread.

My long Covid: how I finally came back to life
Francesca Steele had given up hope. Then she tried an alternative health treatment
When I had been suffering from long Covid for nearly one year, a doctor told me: “It’s time for you to accept that you might never again be the same person you were before.” She said it so casually, as if it were no big deal.

I didn’t want to believe her but I was at the point where I felt like my entire life was being stolen from me piece by piece. After getting a mild case of Covid at Christmas 2020, I then experienced a rollercoaster of symptoms including debilitating fatigue, stomach and muscle pain and a horrible, poisonous feeling similar to the flu.
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/my-long-covid-how-i-finally-came-back-to-life-z8d6fvlrz

anyone have access to the full article?
 
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And again, she states -

There is a sector of the ME community that lobbies hard against such strategies [i.e. the 1ightning process], suggesting that successes must be coincidental or made up.
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So, that wou1d inc1ude the NICE guide1ine committee and the substantia1 evidence review that the 2021 ME/CFS guide1ines are based on.
 
Obviously there will be no objections from the crowd who chastises long haulers for seeking expensive untested treatments abroad. In fact I pretty much expect the usual anger at taking hope away from people if anyone doesn't think this is the greatest thing ever, of which they will see no irony, of course. Even if it's literally a commercial MLM company whose product is not just secret, but requires participants to sign a vow of secrecy and to only speak good of it. Won't bother any of them, they don't know and wouldn't even care if if was highlighted on a document with the company letterhead. Nuance and details don't matter when it comes to chronic illness.

Simple-but-wrong-answers looks like the way it will be for a while. It really seems like they have given up entirely, don't think there's anything left to discover beyond dotting a few i's missing in a few documents. It's pseudoscience all the way down from here.

Did medieval alchemists give up before then? Or did it die out once modern science made it irrelevant? The asymmetry of bullshit is amplified 100x in academic bubbles.
 
Pacing, recommended by the NHS, involves planning out your day in great detail so that you don’t exceed energy levels. But if anything, pacing made me worse.
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I think that here we see the problem of what often happens when 'pacing' becomes medicalised. IMO a lot of the controversy over pacing vs GET could be better understood as 'respect for clinicians' vs 'patient autonomy'.

With articles like this, I think it is also worth thinking about what we do that means instead of simply being viewed as attempting to inform people of potential problems with these approaches so that people can make up their own mind, there's an impression that "a sector of the ME community that lobbies hard against such strategies". To what extent can we work to present our views in a cautious manner that avoids giving that impression, or distances ourselves from those who may be taking a more ideological approach?

There is a lot of uncertainty here, and I can see how forms of 'negative thinking' could be unhelpful in some situations, and how some sort of ritualistic 'positive thinking' could be useful. At the same time, I've seen people who seemed completely sucked into very unreasonably negative thinking about post-viral symptoms go on to quickly and fully recover for no apparent reason, so it's very difficult to say anything on the basis of these sorts of personal stories.

edit:

There is a sector of the ME community that lobbies hard against such strategies, suggesting that successes must be coincidental or made up
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From what I've seen of these sorts of discussions, that 'must' is unfair, and should be a 'could'. 'Must' would be unreasonable, 'could' seems an important and fair point.

edit 2:

I chatted to several writers who said mind-body work had “cured” them of long Covid but they were afraid to speak out, something I understand because I was trolled after mentioning the concept on Twitter.
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I couldn't see the example of her being trolled after a quick search but it was hard to know what to look for. re being afraid: there are examples of people misrepresenting fair criticism as trolling that would encourage that, but also there are people behaving unpleasantly online and when that's taken as a part of 'ME/CFS advocacy' that's really bad for everyone, and especially patients.

edit 3: I'd guess this was about the incident referred to as trolling:
 
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Looking at some of the comments on line, I feel like twitter is a really unhelpful format.

eg: describing something as 'pseudoscience' without taking the time to carefully explain why just seems like an empty insult that will not persuade anyone and anything. Also, for something like mind-body interventions that can entail a wide range of things (and LP itself seems to be morphing) there will often be elements that can be described as pseudo-scientific, or founded on only very weak evidence, and then elements that are scientifically supported. Any sort of over-confidence or over-simplification will often seem barracking and unreasonable, but twitter seems to encourage short declarative statements.
 
It was probably designed for it - didn't it used to have a 140-160 character limit, like texts (used to, may still do, ain't sent a text in...a long time)?
 
Esther12 said:
Looking at some of the comments on line, I feel like twitter is a really unhelpful format.

eg: describing something as 'pseudoscience' without taking the time to carefully explain why just seems like an empty insult that will not persuade anyone and anything. Also, for something like mind-body interventions that can entail a wide range of things (and LP itself seems to be morphing) there will often be elements that can be described as pseudo-scientific, or founded on only very weak evidence, and then elements that are scientifically supported. Any sort of over-confidence or over-simplification will often seem barracking and unreasonable, but twitter seems to encourage short declarative statements.
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I disagree with you. We should call out LP for what it is. It's quackery and does a lot of harm. There's not clinical trial evidence supporting it, the Advertising standards agency in the UK told them to stop advertising and NICE said not to use it. It's pseudoscience. I think it's more responsible to warn people with LC and ME against LP than to worry about nuance and not upsetting anybody.
 
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