I think he's claiming that he can cure it with NLP, although the method appears to be exactly the same as that proposed by the Lightning Process and a few other dubious so-called therapies out there. The horrible thing is that so many people with ME are so desperate to get better than they will try anything, even this brainwashing. Add that to years of being told by society that you're not really ill, and far too many patients are willing to accept being told that they have convinced themselves that they're ill, when in reality they've spent far more time trying to convince themselves that they're well and overexerting themselves into massive deterioration.
Silverblade, ME has been defined for decades, and we do in fact have laws about making unfounded medical claims in this country.
It's a numbers game where a subset (a small one I believe) of the CFS patient group will respond to this kind of therapy and the practitioners don't have to answer to anyone in regards those who they failed to heal or made worse.
In my experience, this subset almost never shows a true recovery long-term. Look at the websites promoting such "methods": they are all based on testimonials rather than research, and the testimonials are always from patients who say that they are improved 2-3 months later.
I once followed the blog of a young woman who claimed that she had been cured of ME by one of these methods. Her blog began very early on, during the treatment (which, typically, was the sort of treatment where you are forced to sign a form saying that you won't discuss certain aspects of it, itself a huge warning sign). It was clearly the brainwashing variety, where she'd been firmly told that she had trained herself to "do ME" rather than to "have ME", and that she just needed to work through the symptoms by doing something energetic. She got by on emergency energy reserves and adrenalin for a short time, then she started deteriorating. It was painful to witness. She'd been trained to overexert herself as a response to her body's signs that she needed rest, and so she kept doing so, and getting worse, and blaming herself for getting worse. Her blog eventually disappeared (the possible reasons why are not nice) but by the time it did, she was already very ill. Her LJ name was iceylime if anyone has been able to find other traces of her, I didn't really look.
I have noticed a trend for these types of faux treatments. I think they're cashing in on three features of ME in particular:
1) It's poorly understood, medical theories vary widely, and it's next to impossible to prove anything when it comes to causes or treatments. This gives charlatans free reign to invent any crazy theory they want, for instance the hypothalamitis notion (which was nothing whatsoever to do with real hypothalamitis).
2) Because of this lack of knowledge, ME patients are used to poor support and social stigma. This makes them unusually easy to manipulate via shaming techniques.
3) The core feature of ME is Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM), i.e. a delayed response to exertion. People with ME can sometimes delay PEM further through sheer willpower (living on adrenalin etc.), and may be able to fool themselves into thinking that they are better, or at least stable, for a short period of time (maximum seems to be 2-3 months, and that's in exceptional cases). The problem is that this sort of brainwashing-induced seeming-remission
always masks deterioration caused by the overexertion that is part of the method, and once the high has worn off, the ME patient crashes very badly indeed. This can range from simple deterioration (e.g. active to housebound) to death, and I believe there was a recent child suicide related to this. Anyway, this feature means that by focusing on the short-term seeming improvement, you can claim that you are causing a real improvement. Then you simply deflect attention away from the long-term deterioration, either by selective testimonials or by a gagging contract.
