Looking for a new CFS treatment? You’ve come to the right place
Chances are you’ve landed on our website today after Google searching for something that is going to help your child or a young person you know to recover from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). There are lots of traditional and alternative treatments available that claim to help young people suffering with CFS, but more often than not, these focus on alleviating the physical symptoms rather than tackling the root cause of the illness.
What treatments have you tried already?
When I first speak to parents about their children’s health in our free exploratory call, they usually have a shopping list of CFS treatments and therapies they have tried already that haven’t been particularly successful or offered any lasting change.
Your GP may have prescribed medication or recommended melatonin supplements to help your child get more sleep. Maybe you were advised to top up their iron levels to reduce tiredness or change their diet, taking out wheat or dairy or adding in probiotic yoghurts. Did you try pacing? This is the regulation of your young person’s activities to match their energy levels, and it is frequently recommended for CFS and ME sufferers.
If you worked your way through the list of conventional CFS treatments with little joy, you may have started to research the effectiveness of complementary or alternative therapies for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome such as acupuncture or herbal remedies. The most ‘out there’ one I heard was someone who had tried a coffee enema. All with little success.
The problem is that none of these CFS therapies really help as they focus on treating an individual’s physical symptoms. While you may see some slight symptomatic improvement in your child’s overall health and wellbeing, these treatments won’t properly resolve CFS in children or teens.
Helen’s story
“When I was 12 years old, I had a virus which I thought was nothing more than a normal fever. It wasn’t until two months later when I missed six weeks of schooling, that I realised something was really wrong. My fatigue was immense, and I had changed from being an energetic kid, to someone who had no energy to wash her own hair. I even found it a struggle to hold my knife and fork whilst eating dinner.
“For eight months, we went back and forth to our doctor looking for an answer. I assumed there would be some form of medication – a “miracle pill”. But it wasn’t until my mother looked up my symptoms in a medical book, that she found chronic fatigue syndrome/ME. I had the fatigue, suffered from headaches/earaches, joint and muscle pain. It was like that for another year before I found Steve.”
Having spoken to hundreds of parents of children with chronic fatigue syndrome, I know that the search for a cure can seem never ending. The good news is that there is CFS therapy out there which works but it requires you and your young person to look at their chronic illness from a very different perspective. Let me explain.
Utilising the body mind connection
When I say to parents that I can transform their teen’s health for the better with a programme which focuses on rewiring the neural pathways in their brain, they are often very confused. Their child has been suffering with real physical symptoms. How can this be solved through their mind? Am I saying they’ve imagined it? No, not at all.
There are a growing number of scientific studies which have proven the link between our mental and physical health. When our minds are not in good health, it has an impact on our bodies and vice versa. This is because our body’s neurological, endocrine and immune systems are networked and communicate together, each influencing the other.
Their function is affected by our thoughts, feelings and automatic unconscious responses. In the case of teen CFS, after repeated stressful episodes, the mind’s response to stress becomes locked on and this has a detrimental effect on the body causing tiredness, fatigue and eventually exhaustion. To unlock the mind’s stress response by correcting the unconscious responses which are the root cause of CFS, we use a unique programme of easy to learn breathing, self-coaching and visualisations, along with physical movement exercises, to help young people create new neural pathways in their brain which allow the body to function in a normal, healthy way.
Young brains are really receptive to being reprogrammed in this way because they have a higher plasticity than adult brains and they have a less developed prefrontal cortex (that’s the part of the brain which deals with working memory). For the young people that undertake the New Pathways Programme, the positive changes begin in just a few days, and their lives can normally be transformed in 3 – 6 months.
Helen’s story
“The first two days on the programme were frustrating as it became apparent that it would be down to me to help myself! All I wanted was for someone to take the responsibility off me. It was the third day though where I saw a significant difference in myself.
“I had woken at 8.30am and then didn’t go to bed until midnight without having to have a sleep during the day. I even went out food shopping with my mum. The packing alone would have tired me out in normal circumstances, but I was feeling so much better. I could hardly believe it.
“Now, it is the most wonderful thing to be well again. I do feel I have missed out on so much time, but believe me I am going to make up for it! My parents can’t believe they have their daughter back. It was almost worse for them as they couldn’t do anything to help me. Now, I can help myself.”
Lots of parents and young people read about our programme and think maybe it’s too good to be true. They’ve already tried different things but they haven’t worked, so why should this be any different? The way I see it is that if you keep doing the same things – treating the physical health symptoms and not the root cause of CFS – you are unlikely to get a different outcome.
We are always happy to put parents in touch with other parents whose children have completed the programme. There’s no greater reassurance than speaking to another person who has been in your shoes and knowing you are finally on the right track.
If you want to read more about the science behind the New Pathways Programme and why it is so successful as a CFS therapy, I’d highly recommend Cure, A journey into the science of mind over body by British scientist and editor Jo Marchant. Her book gives a much deeper insight into the latest school of thought on the mind-body health connection and we recommend it to anyone joining our programme.
Alternatively, head over to the contact page to book in a free, no obligation chat with me to find out more.
