Like many complementary health practitioners working in the 1980's, I felt sure I had a lot to offer clients with M.E. But as time went by I found that although I could help them a bit, I struggled to help them maintain their improvements. After a while I began to almost dread new M.E clients, it was so unsatisfying, and upsetting to have to standby helplessly seeing them continue to suffer.
After developing the Lightning Process, and finding it so successful with all sorts of 'difficult to treat' cases (see the History of The Phil Parker Lightning Process) I began to consider if it would be effective in helping M.E sufferers.
To my astonishment the effects were instant and profound. Clients with all kinds of different M.E symptoms got better over night. At first I was cautious of the initial success.
Would it last, did it just work for a few people and had I just been lucky with my first clients?
After seeing my first five M.E clients, who all reported the same dramatic improvements, and a complete remission from all their symptoms, and following them up over the following 2 years I discovered three important things
1. M.E can be turned around rapidly.
2. The Phil Parker Lightning Process is an extremely effective approach for rapidly recovering permanently from M.E
3. There appears to be a set of common findings in M.E cases, which are a number of repetitive and specific thought patterns. It's is important to emphasise however, that this does not mean that I or the Phil Parker Lightning Process considers M.E to be all in the mind, it is not; it's an illness with major physical components. However, physical approaches to this condition have a poor and slow outcome, whilst addressing these thought patterns seems, so far, to consistently produce rapid and lasting recovering. I consider this to be yet another example of how the body and the mind powerfully influence each other.
To give an example of some of the elements that seem to be common in all M.E sufferers, I present ONE aspect of my M.E research below.
THE PHYSIOLOGICAL CATCH 22
Many sufferers they find themselves stuck in the following downward spiral
1. You fall ill due to an initial 'bug' or some stress, or external factor that started your M.E. This event caused an extreme stress on your immune system.
2. You felt very unwell. The symptoms were either very strong or lasted so long that you began to wonder if you'd ever get better. You consulted your doctor and specialists in a number of fields, but nobody seemed to have any answers, or provided much useful help, and the illness continued.
3. These concerns, understandably, made you even more stressed than you were when you got ill, which in turn made your body produce adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline (also known as epinephrine) and cortisol are a good and normal response to short term stress, but long term production of them exhausts us, it affects our blood sugar and thyroid levels, it suppresses (and messes up the proper regulation of) our immune system and makes us prone to illness and tiredness…..this unfortunately makes you loop back to step 2.
Please note: The physiology of this cycle is well documented by other authorities ( Selye et al), and is explained more fully during the seminar. We've tried to keep the above description brief and simple, but it is of course only a partial glimpse of the complex interactions of the mind, body and hormonal systems, and should not be taken as the entirety of our understanding of the physiological mechanisms involved. More complex events can result from long term stimulation of this cycle, such as adrenal exhaustion and low cortisol levels which in turn create different physiological responses and immune system regulation issues- again these more advanced issues are explained in detail on the seminars.