To Mayo Clinic - please do helpful research or no research at all
What Fresh Eyes said (or see LaurelB's eloquent post re the Gupta program in the "R U Amygdylized?" thread).
I'm going to elaborate anyway:
I think Poet makes a good point that brain injury is an interesting focus for research (I happen to agree that researchers shouldn't just focus on viruses). I agree with Kurt that "mind" (e.g. severe stress) can be a precipitating factor for all kinds of physical disease. I also think it's been observed that something in the pathology of CFS makes us less stress-resilient compared to when we were healthy. Also agree that it's a shame that the skepticism about CFS as an organic disease by the medical establishment has caused patients to have a knee-jerk reaction against any study that involves "stress" or anything that doesn't sound biological the way viruses (or retroviruses for that matter) sound biological.
All that being said, I still believe that this particular "treatment" is a clever, well-designed sham, at least as a physical treatment for ME/CFS, and that the fact that Mayo Clinic is taking it even semi-seriously shows how they view the disease.
The purported "brain retraining" program peddled by Gupta is NOT about getting your mind to fix a brain injury or structural changes in the brain caused by stress (assuming any such damage was caused in the first place). As far as I know, you can't cure a brain injury or undo a structural change (even if it was caused by "stress") simply by thinking positive. Gupta is clever enough to know that too - significantly, he never says anything about brain injury or neuroplasticity; instead, he uses the cleverly vague term "trauma". He argues that said trauma to the amygdyla is temporary and reversible: all you have to do to fix it is to psych yourself out that you're well and - voila! (or not)
My criticism of AR is not that mind/body interventions (which is what AR amounts to) have no benefit (I tried the program and it did teach me ways of reducing stress, which was nice.) My criticism is that the so-called "retraining" is on its face NOT a credible medical treatment for improving the actual physical symptoms of ME/CFS (PEM, POTS, memory lapses, word-finding problems, immune abnormalities, difficulty walking, inability to generate anything close to pre-illness levels of mental and physical energy), whether the culprit (or part of the culprit) for the disease lies in the brain or not. An elaborate mind trick does not a ME/CFS cure make.
If this is clear as day to a lay person/patient, what does it say about the views of the elite medical researchers at Mayo Clinic about our disease that they are spending time and money on this study? Put it together with Mayo Clinic's dismal record of treating CFS patients in the past and take a look at their pleasant website on the disease (which gives the impression that CFS is a vague malady and promotes GET as an effective treatment) - the answer seems pretty clear.
A worthwhile result is if the study uses patients diagnosed by the Canadian Consensus Definition who do not have co-morbid anxiety or depressive disorder, and finds that AR does not lead to permanent improvement of symptoms specific to CFS, especially PEM. That way, as Poet said, more CFS patients will not waste their money (like I did) actually hoping to cure their disease, and force Gupta out of the ME/CFS research field. (I'm fine with him offering his program with less grandiose claims to a wider audience, just as long as he's not claiming he has a cure for this disease.)
A damaging (for ME/CFS science) but easily imaginable result is that the study uses Reeves' disease patients, e.g. patients with physical manifestations of anxiety or depressive disorder (which I personally believe AR WOULD be able to cure - positive thinking, alternative nostril breathing and not obsessing about your body should do wonders for such patients) and promote Gupta's program as an effective treatment.