ME/CFS success story: Lightning Process on Youtube 2019

rainy said:
I'm not just confused by the amount of recovery stories, but I'm confused by the amount of people that think positively about the Lightning Process at all. Not meaning to minimize the value people found in it, just expressing honest confusion about what that value is.

To me the course was such confusing nonsense that I don't even understand how it would be possible to implement it. Even for things like self-esteem or excess worry, which are things Phil Parker recommends LP for.

I don't understand how I could use it for emotional issues, unless I had been a huge fan of walking in circles and saying weird things repetitively a hundred times a day. For me that would be emotionally unhealthy. I always wonder if these people somehow took a different LP than I did, or what it is I missed.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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...
 
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.
 
Andy said:
The owner of a YouTube channel can remove the ability to up- and down-vote on individual videos, as well as remove any or all comments left, as has been mentioned already, or just remove the ability to comment on the video completely.
Click to expand...

The vast majority of the positive comments are from accounts with zero activity which is a bit suspicious.
 
Cinders66 said:
I don’t think we can say it’s necessarily fraudulent.

I think that the CFS dilution from 200 000 to up to 2m is possibly behind some of this, plus potential conflation with pvf. However there’s still allegedly a dramatic turn around in these people.

I never understand how people who describe themselves as virtually housebound manage to do a course out of house that requires 3 consecutive days of attendance afaik.

Until we have lots of hard biomedical research evidence for CFS it’s difficult to see these LP claims really having to have more science behind them.
Click to expand...
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.
 
rainy said:
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...
Click to expand...
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.
 
Trish said:
Thank you @JoanNI and @rainy for sharing your experiences. I think this is vital in a world where most of us are without any treatment or proper care, and desperation can drive us into the hands of charlatans - I've wasted my money on a few in my time.
Click to expand...
The sad thing is, I had read good and bad stories about LP but the desperation to get well overcame all reasoning.
 
NelliePledge said:
Which would be fine if he wasn’t actually selling a product. In which case it’s entirely appropriate to report something making misleading claims.
Click to expand...
Don't know if everyone here is aware that Parker was reported to the Advertising Standards Agency in 2012, and their conclusion was:

We told Phil Parker Group to ensure they did not make medical claims for the LP unless they were supported with robust evidence. We also told them not to refer to conditions for which advice should be sought from suitably qualified health professionals.
Click to expand...

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:
Phil Parker Group Ltd (Phil Parker Group) said Phil Parker was a statutory registered osteopath, psychotherapist and hypnotherapist and that he was therefore suitably qualified to work with people who suffered from the conditions mentioned. They stated that every Lightning Process (LP) practitioner had been personally trained by Phil Parker and his faculty and that they were all clinical hypnotherapists qualified to work with a range of psycho-therapeutic processes.
Click to expand...

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?
 
EzzieD said:
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?
Click to expand...
I’ve found it quite helpful when I used to respond to stuff on Facebook when theLP evangelists come on to post a link to advertising standards ruling it seems to be quite effective at shutting down exchanges.
 
John Mac said:
Weird.
2 hours ago when I clicked on view on youtube and looked at the video the likes = 4, Dislikes = 29.
There were at least a dozen negative comments including mine and just one positive comment.

Now when I view it the Likes/Dislikes is not showing votes and apart from my own comment being displayed all the other negative comments have disappeared and only about 10 positive comments are showing some of which are referring to negative comments which aren't showing anymore.

Are the Likes/Dislikes and negative comments showing for anyone else or is it just me?
My user name is John mac, is my comment showing to anyone else?
Click to expand...
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.
 
Andy said:
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.
Click to expand...

I have come across a couple of people who have recovered but I suspect that is a post viral thing (one was ill for a couple of years).

One of the things I think happens is as people start to feel a bit better they try stuff to improve and then the credit things tried with further improvements. So natural fluctuations can lead to credit to interventions tried at the time. This is why clinical trial are needed and trials that are robust enough to produce solid results (unlike Smile in this case).
 
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom