lightning process/gupta training

high there this is my first post. does anyone think it's possible to be in full-time work and still have enough time each day to get to grips with the lightning process or similar training techniques. i look forward to anyones opinions

Hi Ruben, welcome to the forum. It would be nice to hear a bit more about you, i think many on here are not that interested in the lightening process, have you done it?

The lighting process and friends are basically a scam. CFS/ME patients are so desperate, they will flock to anyone that offers any sort of cure, even if that cure is totally bogus. The fact they claim to cure people after 3 days, is beyond ridiculous.

If you work full time why would you "need" the Lighning, Gupta etc?

Is this an advertisement or other selling expedition. I hope that you will understand that making first posts to a forum on really controversial topics is very strange.

If you are a person with CFS who needs help, then welcome, please stay and read the other topics.

I tried the Gupta stuff and had no improvement. Beyond the facade it's not very different from CBT. It's actually a collection of different psychological techniques (NLP, mindfulness, etc) cleverly repackaged, though the core is based on CBT principles. I found the whole thing really disgusting... it's taking advantage of vulnerable people.
I would admit that it might work for "pure" depression cases, though in such cases one would probably do better taking CBT sessions.

hi there, and thanks for comments, firstly Justy's point about knowing a bit more about me. well i'm a male of 55 and have had me/cfs since before i was 20. i have naturally spent a lot of money over the years to feel right. i saw an LP practitioner in 2009 and am obviously still not well as i wouldn't be on here if i was. however, because of all the accounts i have read about peoples recovery stories i'm sure some at least must be valid. last autumn i went to my local ME/CFS NHS clinic for the first time, although they of course don't have a lot to offer it is good to speak to an NHS professional who specializes in ME/CFS and who you can have a good rapport with. i asked her if she had got much feedback there about the lightning process. she said basically that some peoples lives seemed to be turned round by it, some had a degree of benefit and some had no benefit at all. in her estimation it was about a 1/3 each. i would add though that there are aspects surrounding LP that i do disagree with. i cannot myself see where the where the osteopathy was involved for starters,. most people seem to say it's just NLP. but if the inventers stumbled across anything, i think it was that if you did the NLP to a very highly repetitive degree that this was what could bring about a cure. someone said if i'm working full-time why do i need to do one of these training programmes, well, my work can be one hell of a struggle and i certainly don't lead a full life. although i say so myself i think i just have a very strong willpower. is it easy to be on benefits with ME/CFS? it certainly wasn't in the 1970s. well i look forward to further comments.

Hi Ruben, thanks for telling us more about yourself, i'm so sorry to hear that you have been ill for so long. I would say that if you have allready doen it a few years ago and are not cured then it isnt going to work for you. For me i wouldnt waste my money on it, but if you had some benefits before then you may find it helps again. i cant see why it would be incompatible with working as i thought it was manily techniques aimed at pushing through and re training the brain.

Many people on here i think are very sick and some find it hard to understand anyone being able to work and have M.E, for me working would not be a matter of willpower i just cant physically do it. I do know however that many people have it mildly. I had a sort od remission to mild symptoms for 10 years before i relapsed and became more severely affected. Now im slowly recovering, tiny steps at a time and i have found the info on this forum extremely useful.

I'd say save your money, the lightning process focuses on the fact that if you believe you are sick then you are and that there is actually nothing physically wrong with you. Very much along the lines of the wessely school of thought "an aberrant illness belief". They also say that you can not tell anyone you are doing it, because then it won't work Anyone that got better on it did not have ME.

For those of us that are very sick, it's absolutely not about having a lot of willpower or not and "choosing" to work or not. We simply can not do it. I know that if I do things above what my body can handle for any length of time, I get so sick, my glands in my neck swell up as do my tonsils, the pain goes all through my organs and into my spine. I feel like i'm going to die and it takes weeks to recover. I have had ME for 19 yrs and had good and bad periods during that time, but still was not well enough to work.

I think its interesting how these treatments like the lightening process etc are seen as treatments and cures for some in the UK where its seen as a psychological problem more so then other countries and also less access to treatments like antivirals etc. Also i wonder if the higher success rate over there with these treatments depends on who they encompass into the cfs group ie more dysthymic type patients then actual me/cfs patients, the diagnostic criteria for cfs/me is different in the UK ?? grouping together depression with me/cfs.

Just a thought on why it helps some and not others, although i suppose they could all be good coping skills for anyone with any condition.

hi, is it unheard of then for anyone in the uk with ME/CFS to be treated with antivirals?also, can they be of significant benefit. with regard to the to the full-time work thing again, obviously there is a point where it is impossible,. if i get a migraine, vomiting bug or the flu for example, otherwise i can just about 'keep my head above water'. if employers were really were clued up about ME/CFS then i don't think they would give any of us a job. i'm also interested in other limitations people on here people have in their lives. assuming your finances allowed you to, would you say travel somewhere to have a beach type holiday or would this just be too much?

I'm in London where I have met people who have tried the Gupta/LP and the anti-viral route. The difference that I see is that one set is much more active physically than the other.

The first group are often younger and more likely to believe that the problem is "just" in their lifestyle, behaviour or thinking processes. They don't get tested for viri or any of the immune system type abnormalities. The G/LP are seen by them as a fix for a temporary malady that is within the control of their brain/body to fix. They are less interested in physical abnormalities and less likely to be aware of or have had physical tests or looked at published research on their disease. Less likely to have recurrent acute and severe viral symptoms or an acute onset. More likely to have terrible anxiety or panic attacks as a major feature of their disease. More likely to use the word fatigue and accept it for their symptoms. Less likely to be in a wheelchair or unable to walk short distances or have terrible PEM.

The second group sometimes had an acute viral onset and recurrent viral symptoms. More likely to be too sick to work or have made major adjustments to their work. More likely to have debilitating PEM and to be more housebound. More likely to describe a bigger range of physical symptoms (like the neurological ones) and to have transformed from a well person with a great outlook to a badly disabled one very quickly. More likely to have children with the disease or family members. More likely to have tried lifestyle and diet changes with no cure.

Also families play a strong role here. If someone is young, reliant on their families and they want them to do the Gupta/LP and will pay/get them there that has a bearing.

There is no value judgement here in my descriptions. The groups are equal but just different. In lots of ways it is perception of their disease, outlook/acceptance and belief in psychological cures and education.

RUBEN - there are lots of UK people taking antivirals, immune modulators etc. A few have suppportive NHS consultants but most that I know are reliant on private doctors and the internet.

Pretty much.

With regards to working... It's not like many of us haven't tried several times...

Hi UKXMRV, well this is weird because the first time i got ill 16 years ago i was young and very much sounded more (but not exactly) like your first description of sufferer, and i did recover to near normal (inretrospect more a remission to about 80% than a cure) But since having measles 3 years ago i am now definately like your second group of person. How is this possible to have been both types? do you think it is because it can or has progressed?

Sorry Justy, I've not met many people who have been lucky enough to go into remission and then relapse after such a long time. The people that I know who got ill around the same time as me (25+ years) tended not to go into remission but we have lost so many to cancer, suicide and heart problems.

I was young when ME struck me but sadly I didn't recover.

Dr Ramsay spoke about remission in ME but I can't remember what theories he had.

Are you thinking that the younger/less physically disabled can go into a long remission and this could explain these "cures".

Hi ruben, first thing I'll say is that CFS and fibro are syndromes, not diseases. We can't assume that everyone who falls into either or both of these buckets has the same underlying problem(s). We therefore shouldn't be surprised if a particular intervention allows some people to clamber out of the bucket and not others. Currently the medical profession has no ability to distinguish between these groups (if it did it would at least slap different labels on them), and it's not anyone's job in the health system to try to figure out what your particular body needs and what degree of recovery is possible. We have to do that ourselves.

Secondly, the sympathetic nervous system is an autonomic response to a threat to the body's safety. It can be triggered by either psychological (e.g. oncoming truck on the wrong side of the road) or physical (e.g. injury, toxic fumes) phenomena. I know Gupta emphasises the fact that some of these responses are learned.

I'm in the fibro bucket and have found what seems to be effective treatment, at least I'm getting positive changes and improvements in function, and while I'd never heard of the LP before opening this thread, the LP model of CFS fits my condition quite well, and I can see the role each component plays. The osteopathy connection isn't easy to explain, firstly it's more advanced osteopathy than the basic rub and crack stuff, cranial osteopathy works best for me. I have major membranes (esp dura mater) locked into a pattern of strain, consistent with pre-natal injury and stress. I've tried every professional health modality and only advanced osteopathy has been able to recognise and treat this. If you have this going on, then you may need osteopathic intervention to get better. If you don't have it going on, and I'm sure it's possible to land in the CFS bucket without it, osteopathy may not make a scrap of difference.

Even though my condition fits the LP model, there's no way in the world I could be turned around in three days once my condition had had 35 years to become both chronic and complicated by injuries and infections. I've been under treatment for over seven years, not just by osteopathy but by other modalities that have cleared away additional physiological burdens such as allergies and parasites, and only now I am starting to experience substantive and apparently permanent improvements in autonomic regulation and capacity. Had I been treated as an infant, though, my condition would never have developed. Given your long history I would give you little chance of being cured in a weekend workshop.

The role of the psychological elements is pretty simple, but to understand it you have to separate "psychological anxiety" from "physiological anxiety", something the medical establishment doesn't do (note that the medical profession doesn't acknowledge the sympathetic nervous system either, but it is a fundamental principle of biology). I am not psychologically anxious but my body maintains a chronic state of physiological anxiety. If I become psychologically anxious my body will become more anxious (which is perfectly functional sympathetic nervous system activation), the problem is that instead of increasing my body's short term capacity for action, it only devastates it. Overcoming the sympathetic dysregulation requires, among other things, getting one's body as parasympathetic as possible as often and for as long as possible. Most sufferers are caught in a cycle of positive feedback between physiological and psychological anxiety that needs to be decoupled if they are to recover. Mindfulness, awareness, etc, are techniques for recognising, isolating, and hopefully shutting down sources of both kinds of anxiety that are gratuitously triggering the sympathetic nervous response. All the available treatments for this kind of problem can only hold if the patient has some competence in this, otherwise they just come undone again. I've read the book from the Gupta package and it's all stuff I had to adopt 15-20 years before I became disabled, just so I could function. If you are skilled and experienced at managing your body you may not encounter anything new in Gupta or anything on the psychological side, but if you've never had your system checked by a good cranial osteopath I'd recommend trying that and asking them what they find.

Lastly, I think some people get turned around in a three-day workshop because while they have the physiological anxiety problem, it is being caused purely by chronic psychological anxiety, and they have no underlying physical problem. The moment they learn to stop their minds holding their bodies in a chronically sympathetic state, there's nothing stopping them from recovering. This, by the way, is pretty much the medical model of our problem.

Well i guess thats one possibility. the reason i responded was manily because i was so struck by your two models and how well i fitted in with them both but over a long period of time, and this got me wondering why that was. I havent done the LP by the way. The other thing is that i realise i am very lucky to have had a long remission and am now also making good progress i realise that i didnt have normal health during this time. i still couldnt do what well people could all the time or a thte level they could, but yes my functioning was good enough that
it was hard to see i was sick, it was easy to shrug it off as nothing and just live with the limitations.

just found this from Dr Ramsey:

The chronic case of M.E. can take two different forms. In the first there is a recurring cycle of remission and relapse. In three doctors who contracted the infection between 1955 and 1958 the endless alternation of remission and relapse, still continues. In my experience a remission can last as long as 3 years. Marinacci and Von Hagen record one of seven years. The second form of chronic M.E. is more tragic in that no remission occurs. The patient lives a very restricted existence, unable to walk more than a short distance and that with considerable difficulty, unable to read for any length of time and in many cases subject to disturbance of sleep rhythm and/or vivid dreams and always the almost invariable frequency of micturition, hyperacusis and dizzy spells.

Remission and type of illness, Gupta

I too have been sick for 19 years after a viral infection, not E B. For the first 10 years I was extremely ill, hardly able to walk and relapsed after exercise, even very small exercise. This relapse could last for months and years. The next couple of years I was very slowly improving but still housebound and needing a wheelchair for long distances. My GP suggested I take the immune modulator immunonir, Isoprinosine, after 18 months of taking it I had improved hundred percent. I went to the gym and lead a normal life for five years. Because it was expensive I cut down on my dose and after a period of stress ME/CFS came back. I couldn't believe it! I became very physically ill again but not as bad as my original illness. I have gone back onto the recommended dose of imunovir. After being a year or so with the same level of illness, for the last three months I have been quietly improving again. As my GP says we can't say that it is the imunovir. But Nancy Klimas has research that shows that imunovir does improve the NK cells and bring the body more into balance. It also appears that perhaps only about 30% of patients are helped by imunovir. I too have tried the Gupta program, and still use his meditation tapes, and positive thinking. But in all honesty I can't say that it has made any improvement in my physical abilities. We know that in all illness, meditation and positive thinking as a good way to go but just as with having the flu, no amount of psychological techniques are going to make us better.

Frankie, your story gives me hope! Whilst I have accepted that I will have ME for life, my aim is to suppress the disease some how and be able to live an almost normal life. It sounds like imunovir did that for you. I am imagining that it is quite expensive? What dose were you taking that put you into remission?. I guess it really needs to be a lifetime drug, by the sounds of it?.

Someone mentioned a beach holiday? Now when the choice of some days is either a shower or a ten minute walk leaning on a trolley around the supermarket, the other days housebound, I think its doubtful anyone with severe ME would be booking one. Also IMO as for LP, its not even worth a debate as far as ME is concerned.