First of all I want to talk about food intolerance tests. I have had a variety. One was done at a well know health food shop so long ago I can barely remember when but let's say 12 years ago. This involved some kind of meter thing which you touched at the same time as touching a bottle conataining various food substances and if you were intolerant the needle would move. I ended up with a massive list of foods I couldn't eat and my new diet didn't last long. It was impossible to cut them all out and when I did I didn't feel any benefit. Another test I had was the more well known York Food tests. This was around about 8years ago (ish). Basically, I supplied a small home blood sample (2 or 3 drops) and paid a low fee to get a yes or no answer to the question 'do I have food intolerances'. If the test came back as a yes you then had a choice to pay more (rather a lot more) to test your blood against a variety of foods, or food and drinks. I chose the option containing the wider variety of food and drink which of course was the most expensive. The test came back showing various intolerances. From what I can remember there was yeast, dairy, and a lower reaction to garlic, liquorice and cola. You were advised to cut these out of your diet for a period of time and that in the future you may be able to reintroduce them slowly. It's a long while ago so my recollection is a bit sketchy. They test for IgG reactions in your blood. However you have to remember this test checks for intolerances NOT allergies. True allergies to food affect only 2% of the population and can be life threatening whereas Intolerances affect many many more people and although they can cause upsetting symptoms, they are never life threatening. I was a bit miffed that you had to answer a question about what symptoms you were experiencing because I felt that it would have been better to not have to reveal any medical problems until after your result. I remember being suspicious that knowing your symptoms could provide them with information they didn't need to know and that they could just suggest food intolerances commonly linked to whatever symptoms you were experiencing. A nutritionalist at my local hospital was shocked at how many foods I had cut from my diet because he said my body could be lacking in vitamins and minerals (I did indeed become calcium deficient when I cut dairy out). York tests do provide information on how to replace vitamins and minerals etc but I obviously hadn't done enough. The nutritionalist didn't believe that any test could reveal intolerances and informed me that the only real way to know was to live on a bland/basic elimination diet before reintroducing foods one at a time. I avoided the foods that York tests had showed an intolerance to for a long time. I ordered special bread online that didn't contain yeast and had to have eight loaves delivered at once to ensure the postage was worth it. I struggled when I went abroad and had to sneak my special bread and rice milk into Spain. It was such a pain having to look through every ingredient in the foods I was consuming and shopping would take ages, I didn't feel a massive benefit and I lost quite a lot of weight over the year (which I didn't need to because I was already skinny). I really don't feel that it was helpful to me and I felt that being so restricted was impacting my life in a negative way. To this day I still use rice milk on my cereal and it's only in the past year or so that I have begun eating cheese again. I feel that food tests and label reading has given me a bit of a problem with food. I eat a LOT and always have, I have a strong appetite but it has taken a massive edge off of the enjoyment I get from food. I worry that everything I eat is making me ill. I worry before I eat and long after because I just don't know what makes me so bad. There is so many stories in the media about certain foods being really good for you and certain foods being bad for you and when you have had years of 'label reading' it makes you analyse everything. I feel this causes you to develop a non weight related eating disorder because your relationship with food changes and worrying about every thing you eat is a really unhealthy in to do. I guess with some people it really helps to have food intolerance tests and to follow certain restricted diets especially with people who suffer from coeliac disease and can't eat gluten. However coeliac disease is an auto immune system disease and not an intolerance or allergy so it is different.
The next thing I want to tell you about is something called The Lightning Process. Esther Rantzen's daughter Emily tried the treatment for her M.E and at the time she claimed that it had cured her (it didn't and she has since spoken out a bit more about it) and it apparently cured a few people in my local M.E support group. I was curious but the first thing that put me off was the cost of this treatment. I seem to recall it was a couple of grand ish and for someone who didn't work that seemed totally out of my reach. I wondered why someone who wanted to help people get better would charge such an extortionate amount of money for what appeared to be a very simple thing. Secondly, it went against everything I believed about my illness. From the limited info you could get about it without actually paying to do it I learnt that it was 'a training programme' and able to treat a long list of conditions. Now, many years later the website seems to have a lot more information on the treatment but it is still worded a bit confusingly 'The Lightning Process will teach you how to use Neuroplasticity to break out of any destructive unconscious patterns that are keeping you stuck, and learn to use new, life and health enhancing ones instead' www.lightningprocess.com.
Anyway, a lady in my M.E group trained in it a couple of years after I first heard of it so as soon as she started up her practice I decided to do it. I have to admit the fact that she was charging half of what you would pay to go to London was what made me go for it plus I spoke to a young girl who had been 'cured' by her and had gone from bedridden to travelling around the world. I can't explain the process so I am going to quote from the website. www.actionforme.org.uk and their description reads like this.. 'The website describes LP as a training program (not a therapy) that combines concepts from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), hypnotherapy and life coaching. It claims to help with a range of conditions from fear of failure to depression, addiction, procrastination and stage fright. According to the website “it’s also effective for enhancing happiness, business success, peak performance issues, relationships” and more. The main aim of the process is to “teach you how to regain the control in your life, and so give you the opportunity to break the spiral of illness, M.E., anxiety & stress, overwhelmedness, stuckness or low self esteem, or any other destructive patterns you have.”To achieve this “the key steps are: recognising the patterns which cause the destructive feelings in your life; creating an effective way of stopping these patterns; creating more useful alternative patterns of thinking and action.”it's all about dampening down your adrenaline'
From my own experience I would briefly say that it involves telling yourself to 'stop' the minute you have a negative thought or notice a symptom, to imagine yourself well and living your perfect life and to go on and live it. They also make sure you are 'ready and committed' to do the process before they will let you sign up for it as they believe that any doubts etc can hinder your progress and prevent you from being well again. I have to admit I was very dubious from the beginning and it may be that this did reduce its effectiveness on me. Or maybe it just didn't work? Who knows. Like I have stated before I honestly believe that most alternative treatments are reliant upon your belief in them and this has been proved in the medical world by the placebo effect. Anyway to cut a long story short I went for the treatment hoping for a major change in my condition but it didn't happen. I felt like I was living a lie, trying to act well when I felt the same pain and trying to tell myself I wasn't ill which really felt weird. It seemed confusing because they were saying that they believed in M.E yet you wouldn't tell someone with Diabetes to imagine themselves well and that it would happen. I feel the need to say that the lady who I saw for the treatment was a bit scatty and confused and that she had borrowed a friends house and had cats running in and out of the room. The fact that she was scared of cats and wouldn't move them didn't help! She was lovely but it felt like I was in the hands of a rookie and who knows, maybe if I had gone to London to see the original creator of the process things would have been different. Following my treatment I had a car accident and ended up totally wrecking my Mum's car because I was just so tired and shouldn't have been on the road. I tried to ignore my exhaustion and carried on driving trying to picture myself feeling healthy. It was outside the police station at my local shopping centre where I pulled out not looking to my right at the roundabout and a lorry went right into the side of me. Luckily it only left me with shock and whiplash. I want to be clear that I am not directly linking my accident to the Lightning Process but it is fair to say that it was a contributory factor because I wasn't listening to my body.
My next blog entry will list all the medical procedures and tests that I have ever had done and also I will share some more of my experiences with alternative therapies.
