By David Tuller, DrPH
The Journal of Psychosomatic Research (JPR), an official publication of the European Association of Psychosomatic Medicine (EAPM), has long served as something of a promotional organ for members of the biopsychosocial (BPS) ideological brigades. That’s not surprising, since some of the field’s leading lights—including such well-known grandees as the UK’s Michael Sharpe and Jon Stone, Denmark’s Per Fink and the Netherlands’ Judith Rosmalen–serve on the journal’s editorial board.
In the past, the BPS cabal mainly included proponents of interventions like cognitive behavior therapy and graded exercise therapy as cures for complex illnesses like ME/CFS and, more recently, Long COVID. But the circle has now expanded to include promotors of any and every so-called “mind-body” intervention, which promise rapid recoveries from a multitude of conditions. The evidence for their purported effectiveness consists largely of positive testimonials on the websites of these various mind-body programs.
I have criticized many sub-par papers from the JPR. But the journal has achieved a new low. It has recently published a personal narrative called “Brain training that cured a real illness: first-person testimony about fully recovering from myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) using the lightning process.” And it was published under the heading of “research article,” not “comment” or “opinion.”
That’s right. This prominent journal has decided to endorse a categorical claim of “cure” from a so-called “mind-body” program, based solely on one person’s retrospetive account, and it has further decided to categorize this account as “research.” It goes without saying—at least, it should—that personal narratives of cure do not constitute reliable scientific evidence of the claims being made. But perhaps, in the alternate BPS universe, they carry a different weight.
The author of the piece, Robert Hartman, is a philosophy professor at Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. While pursuing his doctorate an unspecified number of years ago, he writes, he suffered a severe bout of mononucleosis, and then continued to be plagued by symptoms. He received an ME/CFS diagnosis and was sick for five years. At a philosophy conference, he met a woman who recommended the LP. Hartman read up on it and then sought out an LP practitioner. Within a few months, he reports, he was fully recovered.
It is possible to be glad for Hartman that he got better without having to accept wholesale his conviction that the Lightning Process was what cured him. This is not about trusting or not trusting what Hartman writes. It is about whether a scientific journal should be portraying a single person’s retrospective narrative as proof that an intervention like the LP is effective. In the end, Hartman’s essay is no more and no less credible than the many unvetted recovery stories on the websites of mind-body programs.
(Maybe this is where I can mention that Phil Parker, the British former faith healer who created the LP, once declared that he had “this ability to step into other people’s bodies… to assist them in their healing with amazing results.” Just saying.)
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Michael Sharpe’s special issue of the Journal of Psychosomatic Research
Hartman’s LP article is identified as part of a special issue of JPR called “Symptoms, Mind and Body: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” Michael Sharpe, the current president of the EAPM, is one of two guest editors for this special issue. The other is Katherine Dormandy, a philosopher at the University of Innsbruck.
Here is some of the verbiage offered about the theme on the site for the special issue:
“One reason why traditional medical science has so far failed to explain let alone effectively treat persistent symptoms might be that it is still dominated by the biomedical framework for health and human functioning. This framework sharply distinguishes bodies from minds, and allocates the mind and body parts to distinct medical disciplines with little crossover. But the biomedical framework has long faced challenges from other approaches that seek to connect bodies with minds (and social contexts), and work across disciplinary boundaries.”
Whatever. We’ve heard this stuff before. (The theme sounds very similar to ideas that were apparently tossed around for two days at the University of Innsbruck in July, 2025, at a gathering called “Systems Thinking about Chronic Illness: Scientific Controversies and Gatekeeping.” Dormandy was a lead organizer of the event, and Sharpe was a speaker. Perhaps those discussions formed the germ of this special issue.
So far, Hartman’s LP article is the only one featured on the site for the special issue. Journals often issue calls for submissions for special issues, and the JPR seems to have done so in other cases. But I haven’t found a call for submissions for this special issue. (That doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t one.) The special issue site indicates that the “last update” was on September 21st. But was that also the site’s “first update”? I assume so, because there doesn’t seem to be another mention of the special issue on the JPR website, at least that I could find.
If there hasn’t been a call for papers, how did this article get selected as the first? Was it solicited or invited? Presumably the special issue’s co-editors believe it makes a valuable contribution to the effort at expanding the boundaries of what should be considered appropriate evidence for determining if an intervention is effective. Was it reviewed in-house, or was it sent out for peer review? What questions, if any, were raised by internal or external reviewers? What subsequent articles are planned for the special issue? Are the co-editors planning to publish more first-person testimonials from people who report being cured with other mind-body programs, such as the Gupta Program and the Dynamic Neural Retraining System, and to present these individual narratives as proof of effectiveness?
For every Lightning Process recovery story, there is a parallel story of someone failing to get better, or getting much, much worse after attempting to follow the program for days, weeks, even months. Has the journal sought to publish any of these negative accounts as a response? Or are only positive examples regarded as having enough evidentiary value to be accepted for publication in the JPR?
The journal seems to. have gone off the rails with this one.