Firstly I’d like to say “Hi” to all the foggers out there and thank you for your interest in the clinic. There are a lot questions here, some of which could be the subject of a day long course in themselves, so I’ve tried to make my answers in depth enough to give some idea, but please do be understanding if some answers raise more questions than they answer!
Alex
QUESTIONS ON THE CLINIC
Q: For those that know little of your background could you please very quickly outline the history of your clinic i.e. when you first started treating ME patients professionally and your progression to running your own clinic? Also could you outline your current treatments and what people should expect if they come to the clinic?
A: Well, this is a very long question – and covered in great detail in my book “Why ME?” and the clinic website, so here is a very abbreviated version! I suffered for M.E. for seven years from age 15-22. For the first two years of this I was virtually bed-bound, and then after deciding to spend every ounce of energy I had searching for answers, I gradually improved as I came across the various things that worked for me personally. During this period I saw over 35 different practitioners, read over 500 books in related areas and undertook numerous training courses.
During the latter part of my illness I was able to go to university and study psychology, and during my final year at University I did a great deal of training in hypnotherapy, NLP and life coaching (including a practitioner training course with Phil Parker who also created The Lightning Process). At the end of my training Phil invited me to work with him at his clinic where he was treating issues such as stress, anxiety, depression, phobias and problems quitting smoking etc. During this period I completed work on my book “WHY ME? My Journey from M.E. to Health and Happiness.”
This was a fascinating period for me as I was finally getting to do what I loved for a living. However, it was also very difficult financially as Phil was struggling to get enough patients to pass onto me, and the arrangement we had also meant that patients I brought in from my own marketing efforts still gave him a substantial “cut.” After a year or so of this arrangement, I felt financially unable to stay with the clinic as it wasn’t bringing me enough work. I also felt it was important for me to “step-up” and do my own thing.
In the Autumn of 2003 my book was published and I spent eighteen months doing talks all over the UK, running seminars, setting up the clinic, etc, and basically working like an absolute madman (100 hour weeks weren’t rare). I guess in many ways I had something to prove to myself in terms of my own recovery, and I was also making up for all the things I hadn’t been able to do whilst I was ill.
During this time I met Niki Gratrix (who is now Director of Nutrition at the clinic) and Anna Duschinsky (who is Director of Psychology at the clinic). Both shared my insatiable passion for learning (Niki had spent 10 years studying health all over the world and had read an amazing 1,000 books on health, and Anna having been through her own M.E. experience also had this amazing knowledge and experience base to pull on).
The three of us are like family and have subsequently been joined by a small team of equally skilled and competent practitioners (Ashley on the psychology side and Angela on the nutrition side). I’ve always felt that what separates us from other clinics is our integrative approach and knowledge base, and finding exceptional practitioners and training them to a high level in our numerous ways of working takes a lot of time!
The clinic is split into three areas – the clinic itself, the mail-order department (where we have a small selection of our own brand health products and educational CD’s and DVD’s) and the training course department (which offers professional training courses in hypnotherapy, NLP, life coaching and EFT). The clinic (as in the part offering treatments) has two departments – psychology and nutrition. The guiding principle of each has been to systematically study every potential treatment out there and integrate them into the most effective way of working with M.E./CFS. In addition to pioneering certain treatments in the UK for M.E., we are unquestionably the most integrative clinic treating M.E. in the UK, and having treated over 1,000 people with M.E. in the last year alone, I like to think we have got pretty good at what we do!
I think patients would generally describe us as being caring and compassionate, very knowledgeable, friendly as well as professional. I think we are also respected for not jumping on bandwagons or making unrealistic promises or claims.
Q: How much do you charge?
A: That depends obviously what people are doing with us. Sessions on the psychology side are £80 per hour and on the nutrition side are £90 per hour. However, we try and give as much value as we can – so for example when people sign up for our basic protocol on the nutrition side they get free metabolic typing (which normally costs £90) and 10 free home tests. In our new psychology based programme (The 90 Day Programme), people get free copies of all of our educational products – such as Learn to Relax, The Sleep Inducer, Beat Fatigue with Yoga (DVD and book) and a copy of my book.
Q: I’d like to know how long you have been doing your therapy for and if people you very first treated are still well now?
A: I’ve been treating patients for nearly five years now, and we have been specialising in M.E. for around 4 years. Yes, patients I treated right at the start are still well now. When we put together our recent documentary “Freedom From M.E. Journeys to Recovery” (available for free through the website www.FreedomFromME.co.uk) we deliberately chose people that had been recovered for sometime to placate concerns people have about relapsing!
QUESTIONS ON TREATMENTS
Q: Do you ever run seminars or group sessions as opposed to one on one?
A: Yes – check out our new psychology based programme “The 90 Day Programme” by clicking here.
Q: Do you give advice on exercise and pacing? Are any forms of exercise more beneficial/harmful for ME than others?
A: Yes, we definitely talk about exercise and pacing. We feel that for someone who is still in the earlier stages of recovery exercise is madness – but things like gentle walking and especially yoga can really help at certain stages. Our view on pacing is that basically people need to learn to listen to their bodies (easier said than done) and it isn’t so much how long you are doing something for, it is the state we are in when we are doing it – 15 minutes driving during a driving test is a lot more tiring than an hours driving on a quiet motorway!
Q: For new patients, how do you assess whether to focus on nutrition or psychology first? Or do you just let the patient decide what they want to try first?
A: We encourage all new patients to have a free 15 minute chat so they can find out more about us, but also so we can decide whether we feel we can help them, and if so, how.
Q: I have read Alex's book 'Why ME?' and also he has sent me two of his free CDs and I can identify with a lot of his work and understand the basis of a lot of his therapies. However I have been wondering for a while about the term 'hypnotherapy' and what that implies. I understood from his CD 'Lessons in Healing ME' that we as patients are in a state of hypnosis where we condition ourselves to think and behave in certain ways.
Prior to hearing this, my only knowledge of hypnotherapy was the type of hypnosis you see on TV -the act of putting someone into a trance and making them do things that they would not remember after they have been brought out of hypnosis.
My question then, would be, is, how does the hypnotherapy work? Does it involve the type of therapy that I would not remember after the session? or is it simply a term that is misunderstood, and does it actually mean (which I guess to be the case) simply a discussing of the mindset of the client and then a discussion of how to change that mindset? Would Alex be able to explain this in more detail to us to demystify the terminology and its connotations?
A: Good question, and one we get asked a lot! Basically, we have found that a natural result of an illness such as M.E. when the “experts” can’t really tell us what is wrong with us, why it is wrong with us, or what we should do about it…. Is for the nervous system (and mind) to go into a state of anxiety/stress/fear. This can become almost like an operating system for our mind that everything gets filtered through (for example a friend might invite us to their wedding, and rather than just thinking whether we want to go or not, in trying to protect us from relapsing our brain goes through all kinds of fearful scenarios of what might happen such as will it be too much, will we overdo it, will we be able to get the food we need etc) – we call this “Windows M.E.” Being in this way of thinking is like a form of hypnosis, and so one of the things we do is teach people techniques to change these ways of thinking, whilst still making sure they are not pushing their body. However, because this way of thinking takes time to change – traditional hypnosis is ineffective – we are teaching people how to use these techniques for themselves, and so they are fully “conscious” (in fact more conscious) as a result of sessions.
Q: How does the hypnotherapy part work? My worry is that if someone was hypnotised to feel good the more they did then they could actually make themselves even more ill?
A: Absolutely right, and that is why with some more “pushy” approaches we find a lot of people can relapse down the line, and sometimes worse than they were before.
Q: Does the treatment help those with fibro?
A: Yes, there are some differences in our approach to fibro, but yes we still treat it.
Q: Can it help any sufferer of M.E no matter how long they have been ill for or how severe?
A: Yes, but of course every case is different, and factors such as severity and length of illness do have some impact in some cases to how long treatment takes.
Q: What are the main differences between NLP and The Lightning Process?
A: LP was developed out of NLP. I should point out though that for various reasons (that I’m sure are going to come up later) I no longer retain use of the name the Lightning Process.
Q: I listened to your interview with Nikki Gratrix on your website and found it very interesting, she mentioned in the interview that there were different subgroups of people with M.E. and gave examples of a few of them, I was wondering what the different subgroups are and which respond best to your treatments?
A: We define the subgroups as people whose illness is primarily caused by certain factors including the below (this is to give an indication as opposed to a comprehensive list) – however, people often have one or more factors going on:
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Adrenal fatigue or low thyroid
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Immune dysfunction
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Allergies
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Mitochondrial malfunction
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Digestive imbalances such as parasites and candida
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Chronic neurotoxins or pesticide poisoning
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Childhood abuse or trauma
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The body being stuck in an ongoing stress state
QUESTIONS ON CAUSES OF M.E.
Q: What is your view on the causes of ME? In particular do you believe the likelihood of getting ME genetic or that lifestyle/stress or infections are instead the primary factors?
A: We believe that every case is different. We definitely think there is a genetic component (for example why does one person develop, cancer, one heart disease, and another CFS) – however, having a genetic predisposition towards something doesn’t mean it ever has to manifest or it can’t be overcome, it means that this area that we need to be aware of. We have found that the key factor that seems to be going on with most causes is that they are too much for the system to handle, and therefore resulting in a system crash. And loads on a system causing it to crash can include chronic stress, trauma both mental or physical, toxin build up (mercury, pesticides, neurotoxins) and poor diet and allergies.
Q: In your list of things that cause ME you don’t mention viral infections so do you believe ME can be caused by illness?
A: Definitely – but there have been no consistent findings in this area (and we don’t believe there ever will be) of a single virus in everyone which is having a causal effect. And remember chronic mental or physical stress (amongst other things) could be the underlying cause of the virus because stress lowers immunity and can allow an opportunistic infection to take hold.
QUESTIONS ON CLINIC EFFECTIVENESS
Q: What proportion of people fully recovered after treatment?
Q: What proportion of people partially recovered after treatment?
Q: What proportion of people felt some advantage from your treatment even if they did not get better (e.g. by learning how to manage the illness better)?
A: I don’t think it’s appropriate to answer the above questions without clinical trials to back them up. What I would say is that the vast majority of people we treat feel that their treatment is having a tangible benefit, and as you will read on the website, see on the DVD, etc we have treated many people that feel they have made full recoveries, and many that feel they are making dramatic progress
Q: How long does a typical course of treatment take and how long does it typically take for people to show improvement? In particular, would you expect any healing affect to continue afterwards?
A: Of course it very much depends upon the person. However, we expect to see some kind of improvement in the first three months. But, in some cases someone will do a lot of work with us in the first few months, and then go and put things into action (which can take time) and it is several months after that they start to see the changes. And, in other cases people see dramatic changes in only a few days.
Q: How many of your patients tend to stay well after treatment, specifically a year plus after treatment?
A: Again, I feel making claims here would be inappropriate without clinical trials (because I could just do what some clinics do and say everyone we ever treat who does everything we say makes a fully recovery and never relapses, and no one could prove otherwise!). I guess in response to the question do people relapse – the answer is sometimes, but when they do we are nearly always able to find out why and get them back on track relatively easily.
Q: Having seen a reasonable number of sufferers go through NLP based therapies and been convinced to get going by using the techniques. What do you think about the many sufferers that run off adrenaline for a few months only to fall into a huge relapse, and be told that they must just have a blockage, and harder work needs to be done to remove it?
A: I think there are people out there making totally unsupported claims about the effectiveness of their treatments. We are also totally against patients pushing themselves to get well. This approach is for some people what made them ill in the first place.
Q: How many sessions do your clients need on average, to get to a point where they feel able to continue without your assistance? (Though I guess this may depend on a lot of factors including how ill the client is in the first place!)
A: Yes, hugely varies. However someone having one-on-one psychology treatment typically needs around 8 sessions.
Q: How often do you see clients who decide to discontinue treatment as it’s 'not for them' or 'not working'?
A: It certainly happens – at the end of the day there is no one clinic which is right for everyone. However, I believe we get this much less than many clinics because apart from being specialists in M.E., we really do care about patients and if we don’t hear from them we always try to find out what is going on.
Q: Have any people actually been made worse by your treatment?
A: We don’t believe in making patients feel terrible for a period of time just because they are detoxing or they are being treated for something such as Candida – it’s a sign the body has too much to cope with if the patient feels too bad. We have strategies to minimise healing crises and increase the level of support to prevent healing crises altogether. We have had other patients get worse during treatment, but they have always put this down to outside factors, such as going through a bereavement.
Q: Do you feel that the treatments such as Lightning Process, NLP, Hypnotherapy, EFT, Life coaching could be considered as possible cures, or as aids to rehabilitation from a long term chronic illness, for example, breaking 'the sick role' as it is known in psychological circles?
A: I think people should be very wary of anyone claiming or inferring to have a “cure.” As much as anything, my understanding is that to do so is against the law.
Q: If these treatments do promise a cure, are we talking about being able to live "normally", or still having to keep looking over your shoulder and watch what you do, because once you have had ME then it is likely to come back?
A: We have generally found that once someone makes a full recovery, it is intelligent to still be careful with themselves for sometime after. But, we should bear in mind that the process of recovering from M.E. often involves creating an extremely healthy lifestyle – and just where if someone breaks their leg the strongest part of the bone after it has healed is the site of the break, I don’t see why M.E. ultimately has to be any different. But, every case is different.
Q: I and a lot of people I know with M.E experience a lot of procrastination or a lack of self motivation when trying new things, including therapies; resulting in us sabotaging our efforts by giving up too soon. Have you any suggestions for trying to overcome this problem?
A: Well, it’s not easy! I think reminding yourself that it is possible to get better – and it was for this reason that we put together the DVD “Freedom From M.E. Journeys to Recovery.”
Q: How can you explain the fact that a lot of people with M.E, no matter what they try in the way of treatments, nothing seems to work? I personally have tried a lot of alternative/ psychological therapies available including NLP, EFT and Reverse Therapy with little or no improvement. I'm aware of 'psychological reversal' but have you found any ways of overcoming it?
A: We’ve generally found that in each case we can help find the missing pieces, although this is of course different in every case. Psychological Reversal is a term from EFT, but if that is the issue it can easily be overcome by using the first stage of the EFT process. I haven’t come across a case where that was the key factor.
Q: Is there any particular treatment(s) you have found to be more effective than others in the treatment of M.E?
A: Everything and anything we have found to be effective we have integrated into the clinics protocols.
Q: Which of your treatments seems to be the most successful in your experience for ME sufferers (out of NLP, EFT, Lightning Process)?
A: Our experience is that a combination/integrative approach is always the most effective.
Q: No clinic can truly claim to cure everyone. So what have you learnt from the patients that either haven't recovered or took a very long time to do so?
A: We like to think that what makes us stand out from other clinics is our integrative and investigative approach – and therefore it is from patients that don’t initially respond that we learn the most. This is what usually informs new protocols.
Q: Do you think there are any "types" of ME sufferers who are less likely to benefit from treatment at your clinic or take much longer to recover? By types I mean both psychological (depressive, or analytical, or lazy etc) and physical (ME severity or particular symptoms).
A: On the psychology side, being lazy, analytical etc obviously is not helpful – however, these are factors that if they come up can be looked at as part of treatment, but can slow it down. Physical factors such as severity etc definitely have an impact, but not in every case – for example there are cases of people with more severe symptoms that have been ill for longer that have shifted more quickly than their opposites.
QUESTIONS ON HOW CLINIC RELATES TO OTHER PRACTITIONERS / TREATMENTS
Q: Do you collaborate with any other ME practitioners outside your clinic? In particular do you ever collaborate or exchange ideas with Phil Parker (Lightning Process), Dr Eaton (Reverse Therapy), Dr Mickel (Mickel Therapy) or mainstream medical doctors (eg Prof Findley)? If not do you ever see yourself doing so in the future?
A: The main challenge is that most practitioners in the field are rather protective of their ideas and ways of working – in fact some will not even give you a qualification unless you sign a document saying you will never combine it with another approach. I feel it is inappropriate to go into detail or mention names here, but suffice to say that we try to share and integrate as many ideas as we can.
Q: What are the similarities and differences between your approach to psychological treatments and the Lightning Process?
A: As I mentioned earlier, I worked with Phil Parker (creator of LP) for my first year in clinical practice. At that time he had only ever treated three people with M.E. – one improved, one stayed the same, and one got worse. Through various applications with patients, we found that LP, which Phil had previously been using in other areas, was effective with some cases of M.E. It was with the publication of my book “WHY ME?” which LP started to be used more consistently with M.E. with varying results. Although in the clinic we still use techniques such as LP, I have decided to distant ourselves from the unfounded and I think at times misleading claims that surround it. I feel that a lot of the practitioners applying it simply don’t have enough experience with M.E. (we often have patients come to the clinic that have seen them but not got very far) and are making claims, which are totally inappropriate. I also feel uncomfortable with the lack of support that people get after LP courses.
Q: What is your opinion that, while claiming to believe in and treat M.E as a physical illness, many NLP practitioners treat phobias, anxiety, depression and addiction as their other areas and no other physical illnesses? Why only M.E if they do believe it to be physical?
A: Actually the ideas we are developing in the clinic are also applicable to a number of other chronic illnesses – and I should point out that the physical side of treatment makes up half the clinic!
Q: What is your opinion about many people believing that NLP, while effective for many things, is really not something that ought to claim to treat a W.H.O accepted physical illness, and one that is as complex and differring in each individual as M.E?
A: Well, I think we should also bear in mind that NLP based treatments have indisputably helped a number of people – so should we stop using a treatment that is clearly having some benefit because people don’t fully understand all the factors that are going on?
Q: What is Alex's opinion on the national M.E centre being in conflict with NLP based therepies as an effective treatment for M.E sufferers?
A: I think the big problem here is the unfounded claims people are making – if I was working at the National M.E. Centre I would be looking to protect members as well. However, it is also important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater – these treatments are helping some people, and we have found that used in the right ways with appropriate understanding they can be extremely effective (and ongoingly, not just in the short-term).
RESEARCH
Q: Do either your nutritional or psychological treatments yet have any "mainstream" scientific research that is either the basis for the treatments or that demonstrates the effectiveness of the treatments? Do you plan to have any trials/research done into your treatments?
A: There has been very little research done on the psychology side at the moment. Some of our nutritional protocols are based on research that has already been undertaken (it is scientific journals that we often use to research new protocols on this side).
We are in the process of setting up a clinical study on our clinic’s treatment of M.E./CFS with the University of London at the moment. We are set to start in the next few months, and results will take around 3 years to finally be published.
LOCATION
Q: Do you think being based in Harley Street with its high cost reputation in any way affects people’s perception of the clinic? And are those perceptions justified?
A: Yes, I think it does affect people’s perceptions. It’s difficult because people have inaccurate perceptions about being pricey based in Harley Street –still others would judge us as being less professional for not being there. In any case – we are not there to manipulate people’s perception of the clinic – it’s for practical reasons we are there. It’s a long story, but being in Harley Street was never a conscious choice, but being in Central London was as we have people travel in for treatment from literally all over the world. All I can really say is that our prices, compared to other M.E. specialist treatments (regardless of location), and what we actually offer, are actually very reasonably priced.
When you actually run a clinic you discover a whole host of costs that most people have no idea about it. I’d also like to point out that we make as much information freely available as possible. We’ve now sent out about 8,000 free CD’s and DVD’s – that costs money! We also have a website www.FreedomFromME.co.uk with over 13 CD’s worth of free information, and many handouts etc, and the whole of our DVD free to download.
QUESTIONS ON SELF HELP
Q: For those reading these questions and answers who cannot either afford or travel to try your treatments would you have any suggestions for things they can try to improve their health on their own?
A: This is going to sound like a shameless plug – but there is an awful lot of free information available to download in the Interactive section of www.FreedomFromME.co.uk.
Q: Other than your own CDs and books is there any CDs or books that really stand out to you as ones as being most useful or helpful to ME sufferers?
A: Numerous(!), I’d say 5 great books to start with would be:
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The Biology of Belief – Bruce Lipton
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Ask and It is Given - Ester Hicks
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The Way of the Peaceful Warrior – Dan Millman
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Quantum Healing – Deepak Chopra
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Grace and Grit – Ken Wilber
FUTURE
Q: What are your future plans? What developments are there in the pipeline? Also do you plan to ever open clinics in other parts of the country?
A: Funny you should ask, just as I’m submitting this today, we’ve finalised timescales for starting a clinic in the Birmingham area to serve the North of the country. The plan is to have this up and running in May this year, so please watch our website for further updates.
We’ve also just recently launched new developments to our nutrition protocols, and are right now launching a new psychology based treatment protocol – “The 90 Day Programme.”
In conclusion, I’d just like to thank everyone involved for this opportunity. For anyone who would like to find out more about the clinic – there is lots of information available at www.FreedomFromME.co.uk and at that site you can also order a free copy of a feature length DVD of the same title, which was made by the clinic team in conjunction with former patients.
Alex.
