6 months ago, when I first heard about Ashok Gupta's CFS recovery program, I was hesitant try it out because at first glance it had the gimmicky talk therapy feel to it. Since then, I've focused mainly on photon therapy, ozone therapy, zapper + magnetic pulser, fixing the HPA axis, and clearing energetic blockages via NAET, MFT tapping, and my own personal version of neural therapy with photons (well...co-invented with a friend in Switzerland). Actually, if I didn't know any better, I would say talk therapy sounds like the 11th Commandment compared to pagan therapies I've tried.
Then last week, I heard about an old friend's miraculous recovery from CFS. Here is the full story:
http://aboutmecfs.org/Story/MECFSRecovery.aspx First of all, he's the first person I've ever known that has gone from full-blown CFS to exercising rigorously again, so pigs officially flew that day, right before they got shot right out of the sky with news that my friend Michelle Maykin passed away after a 2-year bout with acute myeloid leukemia. I remember my last piece of advice to her was to consider ozone therapy, and I recall being upset/frustrated that there was so much inertia to even the most intelligent of human beings when it came to considering tried and true alternative therapies. All I wanted to do was to save her time & energy wading through the massive landfills of BS out there with my 4 years of having gone through the gamut. Now I sorely wish that I had just respected her implicit wishes and had one last real conversation with her, like the time we talked about Buddhism at Sweetheart's Cafe.
So despite the celebration about Patient X (the recovered CFS patient, to maintain anonymity) being muted, this has been a really illuminating week for me and, I'm sure, many others in the CFS community that have gotten lambasted for trying to publicize efforts with alternative therapies. It turns out Patient X got better largely with a mix of neural therapy with homeopathy, acupuncture, and lasers. To have a recognizable face in the CFS community come out and say the fairy godmother of alternative medicine saved his life is nothing short of a watershed moment in the CFS community history.
Going with that, I hope to be working with Patient X and Cort Johnson (he started
http://aboutmecfs.org / and is a lead CFS investigator) to promote awareness of this revolutionary technique and to start a collaborative effort between his doctor and my contacts in california. Patient X said his doctor used to do traditional neural therapy, but only had a 2/10 success rate with ME/CFS patients. Once he started injecting homeopathics into NT sites, his success rate skyrocketed. As a segway to my other discovery of the week, one of the sites of neural therapy is the basal ganglia, of which many consider the
amygdala to be a sub-structure.
Ok so a few days after reading the Patient X story, I was visiting the CFSexperimental yahoo group, which is normally a site focused on biochemical therapies, and saw no shortage of mentions about Ashok Gupta's program on retraining the amygdala--including posts by some that say they are just about well after using the program. No mention of trolls? Check. Recovery stories by recognizable names? Check. Maybe it was time to open up the pretty DVD package with the glittery phrase "Recovery Programme" plastered onto it. Maybe not just fighting talk therapy after all.
I just started using the program, which integrates Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques, among others, in retraining the amygdala. This theory makes a whole lotta sense to me because my belief in top-down or bust. I've been focusing so hard on the HPA-axis because I thought that was where the effects of CFS began trickling down, but according to Ashok, it actually occurs at the limbic system level, which is considered the "animal brain," and within the subconscious. The goal is to retrain the amygdala not to respond to certain stressors in an effort to calm down the sympathic nervous system (fight-or-flight) and get the parasympathetic (detoxification, repair, calm) going again. The fight-or-flight response, esp. when it's ongoing, can easily explain many of the symptoms we suffer from. Chronic stress keeps the HPA axis in dysfunction and wears out the glands, depresses immunity while overactivating it at the same time (classic CFS with stealth pathogens and inflammations co-occuring), causes pineal gland dysfunction (sleep problems) via sympathetic nervous system activity and HPA dysfunction, causes orthostatic intolerance because of preferential blood placement in heart and limbs during fight-or-flight. Postexertional malaise is still difficult to explain, but no one else has been able to explain how mitochondrial dysfunction begins either.
Here is an updated summary of his theory:
http://www.prohealth.com//library/showArticle.cfm?libid=14508 *Update: I'm on session 4 (of 12) now, and so far I'm really impressed by his hypothesis & research, but even more so by his 100% accurate understanding of CFS. I didn't realize how much of a discrepancy there would be between a practitioner that sympathizes with CFS or had chronic fatigue (without the syndrome) and a practitioner that
knows the ins and outs of CFS (Ashok had it for 3 years). I almost feel violated because I've never met a practitioner that knows my body so well...and I find myself repeatedly nodding when he's talking...
I'll update on results as I go along. I think this is a good time to try this program, because despite getting to about 65-70%, I've decided not to risk regression by moving back to norcal just yet. Now I have a few more months, and maybe the tools with Ashok and neural therapy, to get to where I really want to be.
Then last week, I heard about an old friend's miraculous recovery from CFS. Here is the full story: http://aboutmecfs.org/Story/MECFSRecovery.aspx First of all, he's the first person I've ever known that has gone from full-blown CFS to exercising rigorously again, so pigs officially flew that day, right before they got shot right out of the sky with news that my friend Michelle Maykin passed away after a 2-year bout with acute myeloid leukemia. I remember my last piece of advice to her was to consider ozone therapy, and I recall being upset/frustrated that there was so much inertia to even the most intelligent of human beings when it came to considering tried and true alternative therapies. All I wanted to do was to save her time & energy wading through the massive landfills of BS out there with my 4 years of having gone through the gamut. Now I sorely wish that I had just respected her implicit wishes and had one last real conversation with her, like the time we talked about Buddhism at Sweetheart's Cafe.
So despite the celebration about Patient X (the recovered CFS patient, to maintain anonymity) being muted, this has been a really illuminating week for me and, I'm sure, many others in the CFS community that have gotten lambasted for trying to publicize efforts with alternative therapies. It turns out Patient X got better largely with a mix of neural therapy with homeopathy, acupuncture, and lasers. To have a recognizable face in the CFS community come out and say the fairy godmother of alternative medicine saved his life is nothing short of a watershed moment in the CFS community history.
Going with that, I hope to be working with Patient X and Cort Johnson (he started http://aboutmecfs.org / and is a lead CFS investigator) to promote awareness of this revolutionary technique and to start a collaborative effort between his doctor and my contacts in california. Patient X said his doctor used to do traditional neural therapy, but only had a 2/10 success rate with ME/CFS patients. Once he started injecting homeopathics into NT sites, his success rate skyrocketed. As a segway to my other discovery of the week, one of the sites of neural therapy is the basal ganglia, of which many consider the amygdala to be a sub-structure.
Ok so a few days after reading the Patient X story, I was visiting the CFSexperimental yahoo group, which is normally a site focused on biochemical therapies, and saw no shortage of mentions about Ashok Gupta's program on retraining the amygdala--including posts by some that say they are just about well after using the program. No mention of trolls? Check. Recovery stories by recognizable names? Check. Maybe it was time to open up the pretty DVD package with the glittery phrase "Recovery Programme" plastered onto it. Maybe not just fighting talk therapy after all.
I just started using the program, which integrates Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques, among others, in retraining the amygdala. This theory makes a whole lotta sense to me because my belief in top-down or bust. I've been focusing so hard on the HPA-axis because I thought that was where the effects of CFS began trickling down, but according to Ashok, it actually occurs at the limbic system level, which is considered the "animal brain," and within the subconscious. The goal is to retrain the amygdala not to respond to certain stressors in an effort to calm down the sympathic nervous system (fight-or-flight) and get the parasympathetic (detoxification, repair, calm) going again. The fight-or-flight response, esp. when it's ongoing, can easily explain many of the symptoms we suffer from. Chronic stress keeps the HPA axis in dysfunction and wears out the glands, depresses immunity while overactivating it at the same time (classic CFS with stealth pathogens and inflammations co-occuring), causes pineal gland dysfunction (sleep problems) via sympathetic nervous system activity and HPA dysfunction, causes orthostatic intolerance because of preferential blood placement in heart and limbs during fight-or-flight. Postexertional malaise is still difficult to explain, but no one else has been able to explain how mitochondrial dysfunction begins either.
Here is an updated summary of his theory: http://www.prohealth.com//library/showArticle.cfm?libid=14508
*Update: I'm on session 4 (of 12) now, and so far I'm really impressed by his hypothesis & research, but even more so by his 100% accurate understanding of CFS. I didn't realize how much of a discrepancy there would be between a practitioner that sympathizes with CFS or had chronic fatigue (without the syndrome) and a practitioner that knows the ins and outs of CFS (Ashok had it for 3 years). I almost feel violated because I've never met a practitioner that knows my body so well...and I find myself repeatedly nodding when he's talking...
I'll update on results as I go along. I think this is a good time to try this program, because despite getting to about 65-70%, I've decided not to risk regression by moving back to norcal just yet. Now I have a few more months, and maybe the tools with Ashok and neural therapy, to get to where I really want to be.