TheWEL courses - David Reilly

There are a range of courses branded under the TheWEL banner. David Reilly, a Glasgow doctor, is the developer of the courses.

My local health authority in New Zealand seems to be considering offering TheWEL courses for people with chronic illnesses specifically including ME/CFS. A person from Scotland has been brought here to present to health professionals to gauge interest and it seems to have gone down well. I am assured that the course will aim to 'help people cope' rather than cure them.

However, I've just spent a few hours listening to sessions and talks provided by Reilly online and I found it a bit disquieting.
http://thewel.org/theWEL/1__Foundations.html
http://thewel.org/theWEL/Videos.html

Reilly had CFS for a few years, but recovered. He seems to believe that the mind is powerful and there's a good chance we could become well if we want to. There are two recorded sessions available online that were delivered to a group of people with CFS. In them, he mentions that the MEA gives a falsely negative idea about the possibility of recovery. There is a bit about eating for health, and a bit about meditation. But, mostly, it's about how current medical practice isn't fixing people and so things need to be done a new way. Which, as far as I can see, seems to be about patients thinking more positively and taking charge of our own lives. I felt that there was a suggestion of 'if you aren't getting better, you aren't trying hard enough' underneath the friendly Billy Connolly-accented chat.

Some of what he says makes sense, which makes it all the harder to argue against the whole package. And I'm sure his ideas can help some people with illnesses like Type 2 diabetes, where changes in eating and exercise and good self-care may lead to real health improvements. (Although I'm not sure that the ideas are so ground breaking that we couldn't find an unbranded local speaker for that).

Has anyone had experience with TheWEL courses, or with making the case for scarce health funds not be used on such courses for people with ME/CFS?

 

I started watching the first video you linked and got bored very quickly. I found his patronising manner and waffle intensely irritating.

So I skipped to the last few minutes where he openly dismisses all the medical and alt med treatments which he describes as mechanistic tools including double blind trials, and says we need to turn to the other side of our selves - compassion, etc, to enable real change. Or words to that effect.

Not for me thank you!

 

Anything worse than someone who tries to make money off “being superior enough” to “recover” oh yes a dr who is a superhuman

Wow that website really is rubbish spelling mistakes right through to having light text on dark background to make it hard for people with visual impairments. And the language is totally psych-hippy man. Content is crap as well I mean based on 93% approval 3 weeks after the course this is something we should all rush out and do........

Sorry Kiwis somebody over there has lost the plot for picking up on this - I call TRIPE. It’s not even professional tripe.

 

Reilly makes a big deal of the fact that an injected placebo resulted in the same release of dopamine in Parkinsons patients as a drug that was being tested. This he sees as evidence that the mind is powerful and can heal us.

If the Parkinsons patients had learned that injections of drugs led to loss of tremors, I guess that there might be a dopamine release as a sort of Pavlovian response. There was a study that found that the placebo response only worked in patients who had received Parkinsons drugs previously, which supports that idea. How long the placebo response might be, or how strong relative to an effective drug, I don't know.

I'll have to look into it a bit more. Anyone know more about the placebo response in Parkinsons?

 

This from the website:

It is concerning that what is apparently a one man money making organisation that sells false hope and creepy quack therapy is both a charity and funded by the Scottish Government.

Worth looking in to how it comes to be a charity, what his 'Dr.' title signifies, and why the Scottish government are donors.

 

No sooner said than done:

My bolding.

More at link:

http://www.davidreilly.net/HealingShift/Bio_&_Contact.html

Edit to add: He's into homeopathy too.

 

The healing shift. Think we’ve spotted another typo

 

Surely if that placebo effect in Parkinson's was real objective and lasting it would be a recognised treatment. Sounds like a temporary subjective effect to me, like that asthma study often quoted where the placebo inhaler gave subjective improvement but not objective change.

 

Yep, a District Health Board. I only have this from a person who attended the pilot program that was run to gauge interest from health professionals. It may be that someone further up in the organisation will think harder before approving funding courses for patients.

I believe the plan is to actually provide courses, rather than have people watch videos. The website does suggest in a few places that there is evidence. I'd have to look harder to be sure exactly what is there (I agree @Wonko, the website is bad). I expect it's based on how people fill out the questionnaires at the end of the course and/or is subjective.

Yes, indeed. After watching those videos, and even though I could see the techniques Reilly used, I have felt quite demoralised ( a niggling feeling of 'maybe I could try harder to be well?' even though I know I could not have, and also feeling sad that people who are supposed to be helping can't see this stuff for what it is).

At one point in a video Reilly talks about drawing. After having got everyone saying that they can't draw (even a person who initially said that they could), he muses on what this pessimistic belief about drawing talents might be indicating about the group. He then asks who would like to be able to draw, and everyone obligingly says, 'yeah, that would be good'. And then he asks, 'but what's holding you back?'. And people say 'fear of failure', 'too much effort', 'don't want to be able to draw that much'. He then shows evidence that people were taught to draw in 5 days. He asks, 'knowing that it's quite easy, does that make you more inclined to try?'. It's a not very subtle extended metaphor for getting better.

Yes, surely.