Summary
- Following an intense viral infection in 2019, I became ill with a mysterious chronic illness, which became progressively worse until mid-2024 when I became partially bedbound with dozens of debilitating symptoms that normal humans only experience in the months/weeks/days leading up to death. Over my years of being ill, I saw over 30 doctors/therapists/health coaches and tried well over 100 different treatments and palliatives. Most of these did nothing or made things worse, or at best provided slight relief. I try to give a sense of what it is like to live with such an illness.
- In mid-2024 I began a treatment called brain retraining (also known by other names, such as the mindbody approach and mindbody work; I will use any of these terms throughout the blog post interchangeably), which cannot be explained in such a small space as this summary but which you can think of as a combination of meditation and exposure therapy, and which is widely considered to be a scam in the "complex chronic illness space" (a vague and spread-out space of people who suffer from illnesses such as ME/CFS, MCAS, mold illness, post-viral illness, long COVID, chronic Lyme disease [...]
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Outline:(00:13) Summary
(04:20) Introduction
(08:11) A quick summary of my illness from 2019 to May 2024
(11:12) List of doctors and treatments I tried
(18:44) Back to my May 2024 post
(20:30) Nystatin withdrawal and crash (May and June 2024)
(22:31) Visiting the hell realms (what summer 2024 was like)
(35:07) What about post-exertional malaise (PEM)?
(40:41) Brain retraining
(44:46) An outline of the Gupta Program
(53:28) My experience with the Gupta Program
(55:18) Branching out: Dan Buglio, Miguel Bautista, and Helmut Koeckritz
(01:09:23) Is brain retraining the same thing as therapy or meditation?
(01:21:23) Legitimate scams, and the poor marketing of brain retraining
(01:24:13) How I almost figured out mindbody stuff several times in the past, and why I gave up on it each time
(01:32:27) Generalizing from my own experience
(01:35:46) Luck-based medicine? and medical miracles
(01:38:32) Being stuck in my head
(01:43:36) Why did I become so ill? Understanding the deeper reasons for mindbody conditions
(01:48:06) Where I am now, and what is next?
The original text contained 17 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. ---
First published:
October 30th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FZ4iJvqmzxXFSz6JX/my-experiences-with-the-extremes-of-post-viral-illness-and
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Narrated by
TYPE III AUDIO.
