Phil Parker Lightning Process : It isn’t medicine. It’s a fallacy.
Recently rumours have been circulating in magazines and news articles about people who are being cured of their chronic fatigue syndrome (or M.E) by a fantastic new treatment, known as the Lightning Process by Phil Parker. The final straw that spurred me on to making this post was noticing a recent a BBC news segment, featuring the daughter of some jumped-up celebrity – no doubt with a penchant for New Age remedies and biting tree bark, or whatever these hippies like to do. She, like a few others, claimed that her post-viral fatigue (which these hippy-hoo-ha types always enjoy misrepresenting as M.E) was cured in a matter of hours by this wondrous method. The Lightning Process can, they say, render them completely fit and well after a ten minute session with a trained Lightning Process practitioner. It is, they continue to ramble, based on an exciting and new technique called NLP.
Phil Parker himself claims to be a graduate of osteopathy and cranial osteopathy. He also pedals that he has training in applied kinesiology. He confidently asserts that he is a guru in NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming – which is, suspiciously, a registered trademark).
The problem is that I know precisely what NLP is, having researched the subject for a number of years. It is a crude falsification of psychotherapy, which makes use of its own brand of pseudoscientific jargon, designed to baffle the unwitting customer (yes, people pay for this bullshit) into believing that it has a foundation in tested and approved science. I also know that the rest of these complicated nouns are designed to appear as scientific fields, with their Greek derivations of “logos” tagged surreptitiously onto the end. However, they all remain ridiculous descriptors of nothing more than Voodoo-pseudo-chunga-dunga-hubba-chububba-witchcraft. Much like homeopathy, these other practices have never been proven to work or, in fact, proven not to work respectively by science.
Phil Parker doesn’t even seem to mind that the pseudosciences that he claims to be a master of aren’t even suited to remedying a bum-rash, let alone a complex physical syndrome like CFS. Chronic fatigue, contrary to the expert opinion of our world media, is a physical condition. It is not, as country-bumpkin types enjoy sneering, ‘all in your head’. It has physiological causation and there is an actual academic debate, based on medical science, as to its source happening right now between leading American research universities and our own British ones. The focus of those concerned with helping people and curing them of this debilitating ailment should be placed firmly on this fact, rather than allowing our media to pander to the underhanded, scheming money grabbers who have a tendency to play on people’s sense of wish fulfilment.
Having suffered with chronic fatigue syndrome for over five years, I have spoken to medical doctors and specialist CFS/ME clinics at length. I have spoken at conferences for the medical community and the educational community. Both myself and others have all raised our curiosities, before now, to doctors and psychologists (not psychiatrists) about the Phil Parker Lightning Process, perhaps out of that same sense of wish fulfilment. I would love to sit in a chair for ten minutes, be told that my illness was a result of my own overactive imagination and be sent home with my life whole and intact. Sadly this was not to be the case. Every legitimate doctor that I mentioned the Lightning Process to actually laughed. Of course the medical community have examined the Lightning Process and concluded that it was probably less effective than popping a stuffed toy up your bottom. I suppose that the old adage, “ask a stupid question and receive only stupid answers,” is appropriate in this case. Of course having someone chat with you isn’t going to cure a physiological illness. The world simply doesn’t work that way.
Now, I was entertaining the idea of writing a full-length article on the workings (or shortcomings, as is the case) of the Lightning Process, but I noticed that the website, ‘The Skeptic’s Dictionary’ has completed the task better than I could. Therefore, I would delight in redirecting you to that very same article:
Hopefully this will clear up any deluded ideas that you might currently possess about CFS/ME and indeed the Lightning Process itself.
Happy reading.
Well written as per always.
I can’t quite believe that Phil Barker has gotten himself as far as being promoted on the BBC news, I think the medical profession ought to be given there say on his “NLP” garbage pedaling ways.
much love
x
We know many people for whom the Lightning Process has worked and have seen chronically ill patients make enormous progress, so it does work for some. As one of them said “I didn’t care how I got well, I just wanted to get out of the hell of being trapped in a body that didn’t work”.
However the worst thing about the L.P is Phil Parker himself. He is a bully, is manipulative, censors anything he doesn’t like, is obsessive about being in charge and of course is making millions out of people who are desperate to be well. At the time of writing (June ’10) many of his practitioners are leaving. There is a growing disatisfaction. Many of them were change workers before they became LP practitioners, respected professionals in their fields. They found themselves in the ‘Phil Parker machine’, obliged to spread the Phil Parker ‘brand’ rather than putting the well being of clients first. Many of them are good people, professional and caring so it is a shame.
We would recommend the LP but not working with Phil Parker – you have to sign legal papers so he can sue you if you put a foot wrong. He overcharges on books and CD’s and employs an ‘ethics committee’ to spy on ‘his’ practitioners. He can, and has, taken practitioners licences away, despite the fact that they have spent thousands of pounds on training.
Last year he told one struggling client who was on his 3 day LP training course in front of hundreds of people that she could ‘fuck off then’ because she was struggling. Obviously a man of deep understanding and compassion.
Richard,
Thank you very much for the comment. It was an enlightening read, to say the least.
I would offer that, since there is no objective medical test for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as yet, or indeed any substantial guage for it, it’s difficult to establish which patients are suffering from a more psychosomatically balanced variant and who is suffering from a physiological ailment.
Obviously, the two aspects are interwoven, but in certain cases the symptoms are very similar to chronic depression or bipolar. This would make diagnosing true CFS/ME a long and difficult process – as I found in my own personal experience. I can only speak for the efficacy of my own doctor’s and physician’s treatment of me, but have been aware of an increased instance of diagnosis of the illness since the time that I fell ill. With such a high margin for error it is likely that some kind of misdiagnosis would occur, especially given some leniency for human error and for the variation in methodology of practice between doctors (take into account that certain doctors are still incredibly sceptical that the illness even exists).
Neuro-linguistic Programming is an incredibly woolly art which seems to have more in common with New Age treatment than medical science. As you indicate with Phil Parker, there seems to be a recurring theme of intense egoism amongst its ‘gurus’. I have to say that I am none too surprised that Phil Parker takes this sordid approach. It’s worth reading some of the ‘science’ and literature behind NLP, and the LP in particular, before commenting on the efficacy of the method. It reads like attempting to use an Airfix modelling kit to build an Apollo Spacecraft. It’s worth remembering that anecdotes are not proof and that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.