ME/CFS success story: Lightning Process on Youtube 2019

None of them had ME. Plenty of aimless people out there with poor motivation, looking for a meaning to their life. It's the same mechanism as cults. Some people find meaning in the weirdest things. It doesn't do anything that a motivational seminar would do. ME is often misdiagnosed so it's an easy target to exploit.

Grifters gonna grift.

 

http://www.virology.ws/2019/08/21/trial-by-error-joan-mcparlands-lightning-process-experience/

 

When I did the LP, one of the things we learned was to exaggerate the way we talk about our health in a positive way.

After day one, we were told to go do something out of the ordinary, now that we had this great tool for health. We could do anything now!

Then on day two we did an exercise were we had to get up in front of the group and talk about how much we had been able to do after the first day of LP, and how wonderful we had felt.

We were told to use big, strong body language, and use words like "incredible, amazing, wonderful" - only strong positive words, about how great we felt and how much we had done. The rest of the group should judge if we had exaggerated strongly enough, and if they thought we didn't, we had to do it over again.

When we were done, the LP pracitioner asked each of us "what could you have done differently in your presentation?" One person said: "well... I guess I could have lied a little more about what I had done."

The LP practitioner then explained that we weren't supposed to exaggerate what we had done, just how we spoke about it. But I certainly had interperated it as the former, and I'm pretty sure most people in my group did.

We had already been told to lie and say we're healthy and dont have ME anymore (we only do ME, sometimes, when we chose to), and to never say we have symptoms or that we feel bad. So it isn't surprising we thought we were supposed to lie about this too. Especially since most of us probably went home after day one feeling awful and not doing anything more than usual. Or if we did more than usual, we were now paying for it in PEM.

The LP is like a course in training people to make great testimonies. You have to say you're cured, even if you aren't. You have to say everything is super amazing, even if it isn't. But just as long as you say it is, it might become true...

 

@JoanNI

 

Earlier this year I met one of my wife's work colleagues who had been diagnosed as having ME years ago but had attended a LP course and had been 'cured'. The problem was that, amongst her anecdotes about her work, she spoke a number of times of how she would get to the end of the week and be completely exhausted. I kept my opinions to myself, no point arguing with the brainwashed, and I didn't want to make my wife's working relationship with her more difficult.

Obviously the misdiagnosis rate for ME will work in the favour of LP, CBT, GET and all the other quack therapies. My wife, a number of years ago, went through about 9 months of post-viral fatigue that looked a lot like 'mild' ME, and I could have easily understood if she had ended up with an ME diagnosis. If she'd been sent to an ME clinic, or attended a LP course, they would have probably been delighted to claim her return to health as a success story for them.

 

The vast majority of the positive comments are from accounts with zero activity which is a bit suspicious.

 

Reporting his video would not be in the spirit of free speech. Phil Parker has a right to make videos even if he is greatly misinformed on what ME is.

 

The advertised ‘3 day’ course is misleading, it’s actually 2days at 4 hours and 1day at 2 hours, so a total of 10 hours over 3 days. There’s minimum travel by taxi to the venue as the LP coach advises staying in a nearby hotel for your ‘life changing’ holiday.

 

Yes that’s correct, ‘think only positive thoughts and speak only positive words with great enthusiasm’ if I remember rightly.
They don’t actually say ‘fake it till you feel it’ but that’s the idea.

 

Yes, I noticed that too. Phil Parker must have a little band of people he alerts to make positive and supportive comments on all ’ME recovery’ videos perhaps?

 

The sad thing is, I had read good and bad stories about LP but the desperation to get well overcame all reasoning.

 

Don't know if everyone here is aware that Parker was reported to the Advertising Standards Agency in 2012, and their conclusion was:

https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/health-the-lightning-process.html

https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/Phil-Parker-Group-Ltd-A11-158035.html

Parker said in his defence:

LOL. He thinks being an osteopath, psychotherapist and hypnotherapist makes him suitably qualified to deal with serious medical conditions, and that personally training other LP practitioners makes them qualified too.

But despite the ASA's rulings, he merrily carries on pushing the same crazy and potentially dangerous nonsense. Seriously needs reporting again, but would it make any difference this time either?

 

Phil Parker tries to silence critics with threats of legal action, let's not stoop to his level.

 

I just had a look and disliked it. As you say, the number of likes and dislikes is not showing, and there are maybe one or two short negative comments (not yours) but the majority are positive and refer to negative comments you can no longer see. Awful.

 

I think that in the future, when ME/CFS is much better understood, it may be that a good many present day ME/CFS diagnoses might include quite a lot of variants, and/or maybe several conditions with strongly overlapping symptoms. I suspect that somewhere within that confusing mix there may well be a subgroup who actually might be helped by gentle exercise, possibly even by very carefully increasing it; with future understanding, these patients might be diagnosed with something different. But I'm certain that better understanding will also show many people with present-day diagnoses can be harmed with that approach, and most will not benefit at all.

So it does not surprise me there are some apparent present day successes to crow about. But for every success, how many people get harmed by this throw-enough-sh*t-against-a-wall-and-some-of-it-will-stick approach.