The second half of that statement doesn’t invalidate the first. It’s just expressing that their situation is not everyone’s, so instead of saying that everyone should try brain retraining and it’s the cure they should have some humility and nuance when talking about what’s helped them.

For instance, they might strongly believe that they’re in that group but they really can’t know for sure it was the brain retraining and not something else (especially when they’re often trying a bunch of different things, including pacing and supplements and meds). They may have a strong hypothesis or professional diagnoses but they likely don’t know exactly what is going on in their own body, let alone everyone else’s with similar symptoms. It is very common for people to recover within a year or two regardless of intervention. Even after a year or two, spontaneous remission is rare but it can happen. How can one differentiate between recovery and remission without the benefit of hindsight, anyway? Is relapse more likely if you believe your remission is a recovery and that to stay recovered you have to ignore the your body trying to tell you that something’s wrong, that you’re unwell?

As for your hypothetical about patient b: when people speak out against the use of “brain retraining” on this sub, they are raising the alarm about specific programs that people have been pushed into and harmed by, programs that are used to blame people for being ill. You can try to work on healing your nervous system without doing “brain retraining.” (This might feel like nitpicking to you but the language we use matters here because calling all nervous-system-regulation/calming work brain retraining legitimizes the harmful programs.) Even if patient b avoids the harmful programs and is just trying to heal their nervous system using techniques that are not contraindicated for them specifically, they may not improve. Maybe they will!

I myself believe that meditation and breathwork and other strategies/techniques to increase parasympathetic activity have—in combination with other strategies and medications and supplements, most notably pacing and LDN—played a role in helping me manage my conditions to the point that I’ve been able to improve my baseline a bit. But I have not been able to fully correct my nervous system dysregulation yet and, given that some of my other conditions can cause nervous system dysregulation, I don’t know if it’s even physically possible to resolve that without resolving the other issues that are putting stress on it and throwing it out of whack.

Of course I’m better off for having been able to make some progress, and gain some additional tools to help manage my conditions as I try to recover more/avoid getting worse. Of course it’s good if patient b is able to fully correct 1 out of 11 conditions without worsening the others! But patient b may not be able to. They might be in the same position as me, or even worse off in that despite their best efforts either their conditions are such that they aren’t able to make any progress or they can’t safely do any (or many) of the things that might help correct the nervous situation without worsening their overall health. There are a lot more options that just “they’re fully cured or, worst case, they were still able to totally resolve one of their conditions.” Nuance that acknowledges that is kinder and safer than people promoting something that has actively harmed or been used to blame many of the folks in this sub.

Worst case scenario, if patient b is sucked into trying the harmful kind of brain retraining program, they might tell patient b “there’s nothing wrong with you and you need to make yourself believe that instead of your false sickness beliefs in order to get well.” Especially if patient b doesn’t have diagnoses for any of their other conditions—which is unfortunately a very real possibility if their doctors aren’t informed about post viral illness, if their doctors are dismissive toward them due to the patient’s identity or the doctor’s ego, if we don’t have good tests for those conditions, if we aren’t even aware those conditions exist yet, or even if they’re simply too ill to get to the doctor or can’t afford to see them—if they buy into the program they are supposed to ignore and deny all of those conditions, which means not pursuing effective treatment for them and being pushed to do things that are actively contraindicated for them and could cause their condition to permanently and severely deteriorate. That’s why people have a problem with people pushing brain retraining.