By Jessica Kenley
Hollywood, CA, (The Hollywood Times) 12/10/2012 – In his 20 years of research, Ashok Gupta has come up with an amazing and incredible treatment for all kinds of things, including Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and now, Long COVID. The Gupta program triggers the body’s natural ability to heal itself in cases where the immune system overreacts to stimuli, like viruses and bacteria. Gupta calls it “brain retraining,” and “Amygdala and Insula retraining.”
In researching “Long Haul” COVID, which is affecting 10-30% of COVID patients, who have persistent symptoms for at least eight weeks, Gupta found that those three-to-four million Americans were suffering silently with their debilitating and often frightening symptoms. These symptoms include fatigue, brain fog, heightened emotions, and concentration problems. Gupta says that “Medical professionals, the media and society need to urgently take this seriously. We are in a devastating secondary pandemic of Long Haul COVID, even in patients who may have been formally classified in the “mild” category. It’s a real health emergency.”
In my interview with Gupta, he told me that what causes long-term COVID is that the survival mode in the brain continues to trigger the immune system as a traumatic response to COVID, even after the virus has exited the body. Gupta works with neuroplasticity treatments, which retrain the brain not to overreact to these stimuli. In a “Game of Thrones” analogy, Gupta said, “Think of the conscious mind as the king of the castle, and the body is the castle. The army is the immune system, but it has been weakened by being attacked, and so it is hypersensitive. All of the body’s resources are being given to the army, and it gets stuck in that mode of hypervigilance when it gets attacked.”
The two brain structures that are involved in this process, he explained, are the amygdala and the insula, with the amygdala being in charge of danger responsiveness. In the Pilot Study that Gupta published, he worked with patients that had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which is a complex, painful condition with few effective treatments. Gupta combined his novel Neuroplasticity program, called, “Amygdala and Insula Retraining” with Mindfulness, to create MAIR, also known as the Gupta Program. In the study, patients were tested for eight weeks against a control group engaging in an equivalent amount of relaxation techniques.
After just eight weeks, Gupta and his team found that the MAIR group had significantly greater reductions in symptoms and pain, and increases in overall health when compared to the control group. When broken down, the key results were a 37% reduction in Fibro (FIQ) Scores (0% in Control Group), a 47% increase in Perceived Health (EQ-VAS) (16% in Control Group), a whopping 46% reduction in Pain Catastrophizing (9% in Control Group), a 45% reduction in Anxiety (HADS-A) (15% in Control Group), and a 41% reduction in Depression (HADS-B) (6% in Control Group), which is astounding.
The older we get, the weaker our immune systems get, Gupta explained to me, which is why COVID has been so devastating in the older populations. Stress and being run-down also are risk factor for Long COVID. The most dangerous part of COVID is when the cytokine storm happens in the body, where the immune system gets too excited and floods the bloodstream with inflammatory proteins called cytokines. These cytokines have the ability to kill tissue and damage organs. With the Gupta Program, patients are taught to recognize danger signals from the brain and stop these sorts of things before they happen, which is, frankly, incredible. Further studies are required to further validate this initial research, but the findings so far are very promising.
If you are interested in collaborating on research, or to get involved, please contact Clinical Research Director, Alex Bratty at [email protected]
Go to guptaprogram.com to find out more about this amazing research and how it is helping people around the globe with many inflammatory conditions.
