Planet Thrive » MCS Brain Retraining: Medical Scam or Breakthrough? Brain Plasticity News > Chemical Sensitivity News > Chronic Fatigue / ME News > Electrical Sensitivity News > Featured > Fibromyalgia News > Gulf War Syndrome News > NEWSMCS Brain Retraining: Medical Scam or Breakthrough? A Rebuttal Article by Julie Genser, founder of Planet Thrive. MCS America’s article “Preying on the Desperate: Miracle Cures Hold False Promise” by Lourdes Salvador and Linda Sepp, which defines amygdala retraining programs for multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)/myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), fibromyalgia (FMS), and related illnesses as medical scams, was surely written with good intention but is full of disinformation. Their list of ten ways to identify a medical scam appears to be helpful at first glance but the example they use — of brain retraining programs — states false information as fact and reflects a true lack of understanding of the scientific concepts at the core of the treatments they attempt to discredit. While their checklist has some good points, others just confuse readers and seem to herd them back to medical mainstream, the very system that has failed those with environmental illness. Neither Salvador nor Sepp appears to have personally tried the brain retraining programs themselves. It would certainly be easier to respect their opinions if they had both personally completed the programs they are maligning and then resolved that they received no benefit. Instead, with their article the authors have taken some truths and half- truths and caricatured them, further polarizing the chemically sensitive community on a relatively new treatment approach that needn’t cause such divisiveness and rancor, especially at this early stage.
Buy DigiTech RP500 Integrated-Effects Switching System: Floor Multieffects - Amazon.com FREE DELIVERY possible on eligible purchases. The quick reference guide to the best dance shows in Cape Town. The Plane of Earth is home to The Rathe, the embodiment and consciousness of the pure, primal earth. The terrain of this realm is varied and includes jungles, caverns. Sunflower Seeds - Earthwalker Sunflower Earthwalker (Helianthus Annuus) - So easy to grow from flower seeds, the Earthwalker mix provides wonderfully warm tones for. Computicket - The Ticket you can Trust. 02 Jun 17 - 18 Jun 17. The Cape Town City Ballet presents the classic Swa. Earthwalker TribeIn this rebuttal article, I hope to clarify some of the issues discussed and bring the conversation back down to one of honest and fair exchange. Their article conveniently avoids naming specific programs, but for the sake of this article, I will stick to talking about Ashok Gupta’s Amygdala Retraining. Their article may be referring to other programs as well, but I am not familiar with them and will refrain from commenting on them here. I’d like to note that Annie Hopper’s program is not an amygdala retraining program but a limbic system retraining, which includes the amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus and anterior cingulate gyrus. Grouping several programs into one general category is unfair in this context, as each is unique even if they do have some overlapping techniques. The main issue the writers seem to have with brain retraining programs is the use of the word “cure” in marketing materials and websites. It’s important to first define the term “cure.” Ashok Gupta defined 1. In his program’s promotional materials, he has always been very clear to state that some people will be completely healed, some will see significant improvement, and some — 1. That does not sound like a scammer to me. In my interview with her, Annie Hopper said “I would say that by . Here is her statement: “In my enthusiasm from recovering from chemical sensitivities, and witnessing others who have recovered as well, I went overboard and used the term “cure” prematurely and perhaps even incorrectly. In addition, these miracle cures often delay appropriate medical care. Wizard101 Skeleton Keys. A huge thanks to flash33 for supplying many of the images and making this post possible! UNFD (pronounced as an initialism or as unified Some may even be harmful or interact with prescription medications in a negative way.”This statement seems to be based on the idea that these programs will be the first form of treatment sought by sufferers when the reality is that most people will seek help from their doctor before pursuing alternative treatments. It’s only after Western medicine has not helped them do most turn to less conventional approaches that have less of a proven track record. In any case, Ashok Gupta does advise patients in the first lesson on his DVD program to see a medical doctor prior to doing the exercises. The greater issue here, for some of us at least, is that in the context of environmental illness most medical treatments require wasting precious time, money, hope, and energy and are certainly potentially harmful. It takes months to find out whether mercury chelation will help or hurt you, or hundreds of dollars to see if the Pall NO/ONOO- Protocol will have a beneficial effect. I burnt my lungs very badly trying nebulized glutathione as part of that protocol. It wasn’t cheap either. The authors caution against pharmaceutical interactions (I’m not even sure how this could possibly occur with a brain retraining program) without even mentioning that for people with severe chemical sensitivities, taking prescription medication can be very dangerous in itself. Most people with environmental illness try to avoid taking pharmaceuticals because their detoxification pathways for xenobiotics are impaired — one of the cornerstone symptoms of the illness. For many of us, myself included, we lack access to any medical care at all, because doctors’ offices are too toxic to enter without causing ourselves great harm. Even if we can enter our doctors’ offices, most of the helpful medical treatments such as nutritional IVs, heat depuration therapy, and supplements are not tolerated to some degree or can speed up a potentially dangerous detoxification process. Most of them are also completely out- of- pocket expenses — a great difficulty for those who are disabled and have a very limited or no income at all. To paint brain retraining exercises as a medical scam within this context does people with MCS a real disservice, because whether or not they provide a true “cure,” they certainly can offer a range of potential improvements. I don’t know anyone with MCS who would not want even a small amount of improvement if they could get it. A treatment that can be done in the safety and comfort of one’s home for under $2. Gupta’s Amygdala Retraining. A 3- day workshop for $9. Hopper’s DNRS, on the other hand, I agree is inaccessible both physically and financially for the vast majority of MCS sufferers who are unable to travel to distant towns where workshops are being held and don’t have any savings left to gamble with. This, in itself, does not invalidate the treatment by any stretch of logic. It just makes it inaccessible to most, for the moment; we need to keep in mind that Gupta has been working on this for over ten years while Hopper’s is a new program only a year in existence, and she plans to make it available in various more affordable and accessible formats in time. But she is one person, recently recovered from severe MCS/ES herself, and can only do so much, so fast. At Planet Thrive we believe that the science of brain plasticity is an exciting frontier and we would like to encourage other practitioners to research and develop new programs in this area. The ultimate hope is that it could help improve the lives of so many thousands of people. Calling recovered MCS patients who are trying to share their recovery techniques scammers certainly won’t encourage others to go public with information of this sort in the future. They write: These scams are often widely touted by the chronically ill because they offer false hope. When one is sick, scared, in pain, and desperate for relief, the promise of being cured is easy to grasp onto. However, the pain of being duped and realizing it was only false hope can be devastating. I have yet to read about or hear from one person who has completed either program and felt duped and devastated. Nonetheless, this is a very true statement. I have experienced it myself, and it is terrible. But my experiences of feeling “duped” and being filled with hope only to be completely let down all revolved around treatments offered by physicians. In one situation, the emotional pain and sense of hopelessness was so great, my toxicity level so high, and my situation so fragile, I nearly killed myself. This was no snake oil salesman in the conventional sense of the word, but a respected physician with a thriving practice who made false promises and had a terrible bedside manner. The authors then claim that “More than one health scam purports to cure CFS and MCS by retraining the amygdala to eliminate fear.”This is a misstatement. The two brain retraining programs I am aware of (Gupta and Hopper) do not purport to retrain the brain to “eliminate fear.” What they claim to do is help to regulate the unconscious “fight or flight” response to perceived threats, which due to toxic injury from chemicals, mold, and other environmental toxins, has become hypersensitized. The goal is a healthy unconscious alert system; not the absence of one. They go on to say that “therapies aimed at reducing the sensory action of the amygdala so that it does not alert one to get away before the harmful effect of a chemical exposure cause physiological damage only serves to increase the danger from the harmful effects of these substances. Fear and toxicity are independent of one another.”Let me emphasize again here that the treatments Gupta and Hopper offer are not meant to leave the patient with a reduced sensory action of their fight or flight center; rather, they are meant to normalize a hypersensitized function. This is a complicated area and I have not studied neurobiology in- depth and do not profess to have all the answers. But my understanding of the process referred to by Gupta and Hopper is that the chemically reactive brain is responding to small amounts of toxic and non- toxic substances in an inappropriate way due to an initial toxic brain injury and ensuing maladapted brain wiring that resulted in limbic system kindling. So we are left with a hypervigilant aversion response to stimuli that might otherwise be inert to others, and our debilitating symptoms are a result of our reactions to the chemicals; not to the chemicals themselves.
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