United Kingdom: Optimum Health Clinic (Alex Howard)

Oh no. Miranda Hart usually incredibly kind hearted about people with CI. Maybe he conned her?

I have to say, I have been recommended his treatment by a fair few people irl with ME or by their families.

 

Am I right in thinking that the sole qualification he claims is a BSc in psychology from Swansea University in 2002. It doesn't seem much.

 

It was only a matter of time. I'm sure her heart's in the right place. Sadly we aren't exactly short of celebrities who seem to understand and initially give us hope, only for it to end with them spouting unhelpful nonsense in interviews or becoming associated with charlatans. Worse is when clinicians go down the same path. Just another thing we regularly have to deal with.

 

I don't know about others but I find this very disheartening. You expect this from the cabal. But this 'support' that is really just more gas-lighting even though well intentioned is just worse somehow.

 

In the First edition of his book 'Why ME? My Journey from ME to Health and Happiness'
Alex Howard writes on page 151:

"I reasoned that from a spiritual perspective I had chosen my illness before I was born as a way
to wake me up to my true self and create the opportunity to remove myself from the world and
discover who I am."
.

 

On Alex Howard's FB and Optimum Health Clinic FB - a response post to his 'Decode Your Fatigue ...' book Posts:


@ Alex : .... "You do know that 'Decode' is the name of a massive and important Genetic study on ME/CFS (NOT on chronic fatigue).

It is rather disingenuous of you to use the word Decode for your new book and Org, and to continue to conflate chronic fatigue with ME. ME is a WHO/CDC/NIH classified neuro-immune multisystem disabling disease.

Chronic fatigue is a very common symptom of many diseases and conditions, including stress, conditions that are not ME.

At this point it only harms ME sufferers for anyone to conflate or confuse ME with chronic fatigue. Please stop doing it.”


Deleted from the FB - and the poster Blocked

 

That's not how reason works.

 

Ah well, there did seem to be some kind of 'reasoning' at work as
on Page 161 of his book ('Why ME? ...') Alex Howard goes on to say:

"My heart tells me that the next step of my path in life involves running
seminars, and that might be one way we can continue our journey together."


Alex, who styled himself as a Psychologist & Motivational Speaker at the age of 23, was hooking the readers in to buy stuff, specifically 'healing' seminars.


Now he sells a '90 day reset programme' specifically for 'ME, CFS and Fibromyalgia'

NOT a recommendation:

"Some of the approaches that have laid the foundations for and influenced The 90 Day Reset Programme include:

• The Lightning Process
• Reverse Therapy
• Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
• CBT
• Neuro-linguistic programming
• The Enneagram
• Life coaching
• Hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis
• Mindfulness
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy"

So, eclectic to say the least, and with endless NLP hooks and anchors, which lead the buyer into buying more and more commercial courses. The coaches repeatedly conflate ME with 'chronic fatigue'.

 

I've noticed that Alex puts a lot of effort into 'treating' people with a public profile. Any normal person who signs up to the OH clinic program won't get to see Alex. He actually popped into the room when I was there to get something and couldn't have been less interested in us. But anyone he thinks might help to promote the clinic gets the full VIP treatment and will be treated by him in person.

 

I watched a few minutes of one of the videos of him on this thread. I find him unwatchable and unlistenable to.

I can’t put my finger on why I guess his salesman intonation is just not that good.

But also he’s quite disturbing to me. I guess it’s the pyramid scheme danger vibe.

 

New Youtube video about his book; interviewed by Raelan Agle.
ME/CFS: Decode Your Fatigue (With Alex Howard)

 

I was recommended to try the Optimum Health Clinic a few years ago by a friend who had had ME, and apparently beaten / treated cured it by working with OHC.

I started 'working' with a nutritional therapist there in early 2020.
They were keen for me to also work with a psychologist there, despite my having very little context or reading or knowledge about ME and the extent of the gaslighting / BPS issues etc etc at that time, I did feel (without really being able to articulate why) that a 'psychological' approach to what I was dealing with was basically bullshit and a red herring.

I did try the 'nutritional' approach though as it seemed more intuitively logical that it might have some effect.
The practitioner I worked with was super kind, patient etc, as far as I could tell she wasn't doing any weird gaslighting and there was no NLP / Lightning Process etc, just lots of talk about symptoms, and suggestions for gradually implementing different dietary changes and supplements.

The sessions and supplements were all pretty expensive as some other people have mentioned, I think I must have ended up spending around £750 over 6 months or so on the sessions (on Zoom) and all the supplements.
The supplements included CO-Q10, D-Ribose, some kind of digestive enzyme/acid(?), something called Rhodiola, and the dietary stuff was more or less: try not eating gluten or dairy, eat meat & fish & vegetables, don't eat sugar.

Overall, I don't think the supplements did anything energy wise, although I had been having weird digestive issues which definitely cleared up with no dairy/gluten & the digestive supplements, the nutritionist/practitioner seemed particularly surprised/disappointed that the D-Ribose and the CO-Q10 didn't seem to do anything.

It wasn't particularly useful and didn't have a long-term impact, the dietary stuff felt more like it helped me to notice which things that I ate or drank would make me feel worse, but excluding them didn't actually make me feel better (if that makes sense).
Not sure if it was worth the money. I mean - it pretty much definitely wasn't worth the money.

I did then buy the Decode Your Fatigue book more recently, and I think I was somehow taken in against my better judgement by the whole idea of 'you need to work to improve / overcome this because otherwise it's not going to get better'...
I suppose I'm desperate for any hint of something that might improve my health so I can be susceptible to the bullshit-merchants. Some of the stuff in the Decode Your Fatigue book about personality types also seemed to ring true, although amusingly I felt like I fitted nicely into I think all of the 5 (?) personality types he describes (something like Helper, Achiever... and some other ones)..

Embarrassingly I even recommended the book to some friends with ME / Long Covid, though since recommending it to them I got fed up with it and felt more resentful of the essentially patient-blaming toxic positivity element. This was all before discovering the S4Me forum.

Happy to scan and share some pages from the Decode Your Fatigue book if anyone's curious - I've already paid for it and maybe we can have a laugh / get some use out of deconstructing some of the nonsense...

 

I think we've all been there at some stage, unfortunately.

 

Thanks @Trish - I haven't seen that Lightening Process thread but I'll check it out now.
Yes my convictions that the psychological approach was not relevant in my case were very strong - both my parents are obsessed with psychoanalytical theory and they would always attempt to explain any physical symptoms/illness that my sisters or I were experiencing as some kind of psychosomatic thing since we were all very young - my sisters and I unsurprisingly got very fed up with that line of thinking very quickly!
I also spent a couple of years taking sertraline for anxiety, which really helped with the anxiety, it also meant that with the massively reduced anxiety it was even more apparent that my PEM / fatigue etc were not 'all in my head'.

 

Optimum Health Clinic has 2 informally resolved complaints from the Advertising Standards Authority - anyone have the detail on these? ASA doesn't show the info but most recent was Feb 2022.

 

So. This is my first post here, (other than my welcome post). This thread was one that came up in a search I did, because my wife had been asking me whether we should spend money to get her fixed. Obviously I'd give more than money to cure her of ME, but I don't like the hard sell. My search for answers on Google led here, to this thread.
In conclusion, it's all snake oil.

 

There do seem to be a very small number of mostly younger, recently ill, mild grade people who claim to benefit (based on the ANS recovery stories). So the group research indicates is most likely to go into remission anyway.

I'm older, severe, with late stage illness but a few years back now I was desperate enough to try two courses anyway (neither OHC, which was too expensive so I saw a local nutritional therapist instead).
Tbf I did find the odd nugget in each helpful in terms of just just mentally coping. But they weren't worth the money then and prices have rocketed since. But I can't say I'd recommend them. There's nothing in them that you can't find out for free - like the sort of supplements listed above, or meditation you tubes etc. At the same time I found the incessant mind body causation pseudoscience talk that went with it frustrating to say the least, at times downright misleading.

If your wife is interested in neuroplasticity / parasympathetic activation techniques as a way to help cope generally (not treatment or cure I hasten to add) you can get a lot of free resources to try from facebook groups and youtube.

 

Yup. And if anyone had found a way to "fix" it, they wouldn't be posting stories on Facebook. They'd be a busy specialist in a clinic or a hospital.