In July 2026 the UKs ‘i newspaper’ published an article about a still-to-be-peer-reviewed study of 75 people who claim to be ‘recovered’ from post-viral type conditions. Several organisations and patients complained about the lack of clear diagnostic criteria. They pointed out the study had no clear definition of ‘recovery’ and was platforming implausible treatments. David Tuller, journalist and public health lecturer from Berkeley, California, has also written an article sharing concerns about the study.
The ME Association issued a statement. It pointed out that the work appeared to make unsubstantiated ‘claims about “cures” for ME/CFS and Long Covid based on “mind-body” therapies, relaxation techniques and “brain retraining”’.
Long Covid SOS included the following comments in their own statement:
Rehabilitation, psychological support and coping strategies may help some people manage chronic illness. But they are not evidence-based cures for Long Covid or ME/CFS, and they should not be presented as such.
When these approaches are framed as treatment, they can encourage self-blame and delay proper biomedical assessment. For people with post-exertional malaise (PEM), they may also worsen symptoms by pushing activity beyond safe limits.
People living with Long Covid and ME/CFS deserve rigorous biomedical research, evidence-based care and accurate communication. People with ME/CFS have been gaslit for years by pseudoscientific claims, and it is long overdue that stopped. The science has more than caught up with this outdated narrative.
Suggesting that recovery depends primarily on adopting a “mind-body” model is misleading. It reinforces the false idea that these illnesses are psychological and shifts responsibility onto patients when they do not improve.
Impact on patients
Rather than getting into the weeds of this (not formally published) research, we asked a patient to explain how this kind of news article impacts her.
Kirsty has been ill long enough to remember similar recovery stories shared since the 1990s. She explains how media coverage like this has affected her, and those around her, over the years. It’s a personal insight into the way that the stigma of, and assumptions about, ME affect individual lives, quite apart from the wider impact such stories have on research funding and the provision of healthcare.
Kirsty’s background
I have had ME for over 30 years, with a 14 year remission in the middle (which had nothing to do with brain-retraining). During that time I’ve seen so many articles like this come and go. It makes me angry that the same old psychological treatments from the 90s have been rebranded. They are being rolled out again, heralded as the ‘new’ cure by scientifically illiterate journalists.
If you take time to read the study it is immediately apparent it is anything but rigorous, but our friends and family don’t see that. They just see the title stating with absolute certainty that we could get better if we wanted to. Look at the proof! All the column inches devoted to inspiring stories about how someone with “CFS” found a new way of reframing their illness and started to improve immediately (these stories never refer to it as ME).
Who can blame people for wanting to believe it? (I’ve even been guilty of it in the past.) It must be so hard to see your child or partner slowly fade away to become a shadow of who you once knew. Even harder to go through it yourself. We want to believe there is a quick and easy way of recovering completely.
Personal experience of ‘brain-retraining therapy’
Most of us have tried some iteration of brain-retraining therapy – it may have been called something different but it’s all rooted in the same ethos. Most of us got a lot sicker because of it.
I am one of them. I did CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy – used to be considered by some to be a treatment for ME but is now seen only as a supportive therapy to help people cope). I did GET (Graded Exercise Therapy – aims to increase exertion by small increments, based on erroneous assumption that ME is caused by deconditioning).
I was told to build up my exercise and ignore how I was feeling. A strong swimmer, I was completely focussed on my recovery. Anyone who knows me knows how determined I can be. I felt wretched but I kept on pushing, after all it was just deconditioning, I had to get fit again. Clearly, I wasn’t really ill: I was imagining it.
I went back to my doctor and said I didn’t think it was helping, I felt much worse. He told me that I was doing it wrong and I had to try harder. So I did, I built up to swimming 30 lengths of a 25m pool. That didn’t last long, I quickly went from mild to moderate and remained that way for another five years. The real kicker was that for years I wondered what I had done wrong, because it hadn’t ‘worked’.
Reflections on the impact of media coverage about ‘brain retraining’ and other discredited ‘cures’ and treatments
Looking back, the only silver lining at that point was the people around me could finally see my ME. It was no longer an abstract concept when I said I couldn’t do something – and they wondered maybe, if I tried a bit harder then perhaps I could? No, I had hit the metaphorical wall and it was there for all to see.
Another day, another article with the same old faces pushing the same old rhetoric. New patients encouraged, their pockets a lot lighter after paying for therapies that will inevitably result in disappointment at best, and harm at worst.
Yes, I am angry, but I confess I am also now resigned to it.
Photo at top of page by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
