Like most treatments:
- The published scientific literature seems to be far more optimistic than what patients are reporting.
- Not a silver bullet for Long COVID or post-vax, according to survey data collected in the Treatment Outcomes Survey. (Patients have tried a lot of treatments and we have not yet found a silver bullet.)
Alexandra Bratty has published a paper claiming that 3+ months of using AIR led to participants experiencing “a significant increase in overall health and functioning for 14 of 16 conditions tested”- including Long COVID, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, MCAS, and Lyme.
However, Alexandra Bratty provides consulting services to the Gupta Program. So let’s turn to what patients are reporting as the patients surveyed likely do not have financial ties to the Gupta program.
Survey Data
On the Treatment Outcomes Survey, the best way to measure efficacy is to see if somebody said that the Gupta program helped them the most (and that person happened to be mostly recovered). Nobody said this. However, we can’t draw any conclusions here because only 14 people on the survey reported data for the Gupta program. It takes a lot more people for just 1 person to experience success from a treatment.
Another way of measuring efficacy is to look at the frequency of people reporting improvement from the treatment. We can assign 3 points for significant improvement, 1 for mild improvement, 0 for not much benefit and effect unclear, and negative -1/-3 points for worsening.
Based on that methodology, the Gupta program is #9 out of 11 mental treatments surveyed.
Source: Dec 27 2023 data dump
However, this methodology is not great because it measures how people answer surveys- which causes prayer and meditation (and ‘other brain retraining’, whatever that is) to be among the top treatments. It also leads to the appearance that most treatments work, which is unlikely. On top of all of that, only 14 people reported data so there isn’t quite enough data to draw reliable conclusions.
Safety
The data suggests that the Gupta program is one of the lower-risk treatments out there. However, with only data on 14 people who tried it, it is too soon to draw conclusions about risk and safety.
The Randomized Controlled Trial supposedly showing a small benefit to the Gupta program (for fibro)
The Gupta Program .com website has a post highlighting a RCT by Sanabria-Mazo and colleagues. The RCT actually studied both mindfulness plus Amygdala and Insula Retraining (MAIR) for the Treatment of Women with Fibromyalgia.
AIR in their paper refers to the Gupta program. M = mindfulness. MAIR is both mindfulness and AIR.
It is not clear that MAIR alone would deliver the same results. It is possible that one of the treatments does something while the other doesn’t.
The big picture
There are people who have recovered from Long COVID and post-vax. And here are the most frequently-cited treatment when they were asked about what helped the most.
Source: version 2 slides
Those treatments remain the most promising right now. The Gupta program doesn’t have as much data supporting it as those other treatments.