Ashok Gupta recounts his personal experience of having ME/CFS during university, describing severe symptoms (extreme fatigue, post-exertional malaise, immune and gastrointestinal symptoms) and the lack of useful medical explanations. After extensive self-directed research into brain neurology and emotion, he concluded the root cause lies in the brain (distinct from "it's all in your head") and retrained his brain to achieve a full recovery. He founded a clinic, worked with patients for about a decade, and published his treatment as a home study course in 2007; thousands have since used it with varying outcomes.
Chapters
So I actually suffered from ME and chronic fatigue syndrome myself at university. And I had it for a number of years. And I remember, you know, really in my darkest moments, and some of you may have experienced it, where I literally had to crawl to the bathroom. It got that bad one of those days. And I never had it as severely as some people where they're bed bound, but it was never as good as some people have it where they can still lead a normal life or somewhere in between. I just thought, you know, my life's over. Here's this brick wall. I have no understanding of what causes this condition. I'm absolutely exhausted all the time with so many different symptoms, immune symptoms, irritable bowel, a huge deep sense of fatigue, inability to move, and a whole, you know, post exertional malaise where I couldn't actually do any activity for long periods of time. And all the other symptoms that if you, if you know about the condition, you'll be familiar with, familiar with. And I didn't know what to do and I thought, okay, well, I have to do my own research because no one's really understanding what's going on. I would go and see doctors and they would say, you know what, probably depression, why don't you take these antidepressants or, you know, just snap out of it, you'll be fine. You know, really quite insulting things in a lot of ways because I was never someone that would make up illness. I was never a hypochondriac. And suddenly here's this illness that, you know, completely defied logic. And of course you do get influenced by what people say and you think, well, maybe I am making it all up in my head. You know, it's a very, very difficult time. And I, you know, I want to empathize with you. If you're going through that right now, where people are lacking that understanding and that compassion, to understand that this really is a real condition, that it affects us in so many different ways. And then, you know, I would try and go from doctor to doctor, I would even go to alternative health practitioners and not really get any benefit. And so I started researching the brain neurology of emotion and trying to understand, well, what causes this condition. I can feel something going on in my brain that I'm observing. What exactly is this? And after many years of persistence and research, I managed to understand what I thought could cause the condition. And, and I gradually was able to, what I call retrain my brain out of this. So it's not all in your head, but I do believe the root cause is in the brain. And I'll come on to what the main difference is between those two statements. And I managed to get myself fully 100% better. And I then set up a clinic to help others. And I spent many years working one on one with patients around 10 years or so. And I got to the stage where I recognized what I thought were the best treatments, the best strategies to help the majority of people. And I then published my treatment as a home study course, because only a certain number of people could see me at my clinic. So I published the treatments in 2007. And since then, we've had thousands of patients all over the world who've been using the treatment, who've been getting better for full recoveries, partial recoveries. And it's been a real labor of love and a real joy.
