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Criticisms of The Gupta Program
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==Introduction== Wide-ranging concerns have been raised about the [[Gupta program]] for conditions that Gupta treats, especially [[ME/CFS]], [[Fibromyalgia]] and [[Long COVID]]. There are recent (2021) complaints from the Covid and Long Covid Community in forums concerning the lack of empirical evidence for Gupta’s treatment of Covid and Long Covid; for aggressive, inaccurate and dangerous advertising; and for his method of connecting and gaining endorsement from well-known Covid figures. For example, the new draft NICE guidelines for ME/CFS clearly state NLP should not be offered to patients with ME; Long Covid patients with similar symptoms should not have to suffer the same mistakes. There are '''historical and present day controversies in the ME Community''' from the Gupta program and other brain retraining organisations: again on misleading and false advertising; patient harm; treating physical problems with psychological methods; and the wider problem of encouraging the belief in “symptoms but no disease”. This leads into the concern about the Gupta program exclusively treats [[Medically unexplained physical symptoms|Medically Unexplained Symptoms]] (MUS) and conditions with no reliable measurable biomarkers; how is one treatment able to treat such variable and different conditions? Treating physical conditions with cognitive techniques and NLP raises the issue looked at upon in Anthropology – Magical Thinking i.e. how changing our thinking changes our reality and state of disease and the issues that come from this in applying it to medicine, including patient blaming. The next point deals with '''Institutional Misogyny''' and how treating conditions [[female predominant diseases|predominantly related to female pain]] with psychological techniques or explaining their aetiology as emotional is a reinvention of the [[hysteria]] paradigm. [[Ashok Gupta]] does not have any medical, scientific, or psychological qualifications – he has an Economics degree from Cambridge University. What are the ethics of charging for an expensive program where the therapist has no training or qualifications and there is no regulatory body to monitor or protect patients? So there is a combination of no empirical evidence and no relevant qualifications. Giving psychological care as a '''primary treatment''' and offering psychological techniques as a cure has been a battle within the ME community. This is very different to offering it to a patient as a secondary and supportive treatment. Both have very different motivations and teleological aims. There is also the concern that this is classic '''pseudoscience''' – where the treatment offered is dressed up in scientific language and presented as scientific and scientific evidence is given to justify the hypothesis. Yet on closer inspection none of the claims can be backed up as rigorous science and is full of theoretical holes and misperception.{{citation needed | date = 2022}} Finally, but most importantly, there is a '''lack of empirical evidence'''. The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA), [[ME Association]] and others have found that none of the scientific papers presented by Gupta are sufficient evidence that his protocol can treat or cure the conditions he claims to. The authors of the most recent published paper were contacted – they had no idea Gupta was using their paper as proof, they have no connection to him and do not endorse his program.
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