Many people suffer from a complex set of overlapping health conditions that can be difficult to understand from a mainstream medical perspective. They appear to involve interactions between pain, fatigue, stress, sleep dysregulation, brain–body communication (autonomic, endocrine, and immune systems), emotion, physical activity — and the brain systems that coordinate and govern them.
A colleague told me recently that he was really helped by a program for long COVID called ansrewire.com. I got curious. How many programs like this are out there? What are their underlying theories of disease? What disorders do they claim to treat, and how? Who started them, and who is using them? Evidence on these questions is scarce or absent in the peer-reviewed scientific literature: There are too many programs, few scientific studies (which take years to conduct and publish!), and too much new growth to keep up and keep track. Enter this Claude Code–generated survey (with some ideas and adjustments from me). Authoritative information here does not exist: There is a lot of guesswork from social media, subscriptions, etc., so take it with a grain of salt.
Integrating information available on these approaches to chronic disease and restoring wellness is revealing. A number of programs claim to help with a wide variety of disorders: Chronic pain, ME/CFS, POTS, TMS, multiple sensitivities, FNDs, mold illness, anxiety, depression, and more. Many were founded by people suffering from these chronic diseases that found relief. Many are commercial. Many have roots in older ideas, some going back millennia. And they converge on a few broad, common theories of disease: A persistent, hypervigilant threat state expressed in brain and body, with different triggers and manifestations for different individuals. A common premise is that this threat state can be ‘unlearned’ over time, harnessing cognitive reappraisal, neuroplasticity, and calibrated exposure to challenges to retrain the brain and body.
I have enjoyed building and exploring this site, and I hope you enjoy it too.
Each band is one program, grouped and colored by family. Thickness is the estimated number of new people engaged each year: people who enrolled, were treated or used the program, not just people who saw content.
Estimates are order-of-magnitude. The Methods tab explains how they were derived. "Log-compressed" makes small programs visible; "People per year" shows true scale, which meditation apps dominate.
Circle area scales with estimated cumulative people engaged. The axis is compressed before 1960.
Left: prior practices and theories, ordered by approximate date of origin. Middle: program families. Right: the programs themselves.
Each program spreads one unit of "influence" equally across the roots its research file names, so the width of a river shows how much a family leans on each tradition.
The river plot links program families to the conditions their programs claim to treat. Width is the number of programs.
In the matrix below, dark cells mark a program's primary targets and light cells mark other claimed conditions. The ◆ / ◇ marker shows whether the program applies one mechanism to every condition (◆) or distinguishes mechanisms by condition (◇).
Most programs name several mechanisms. The ones that cut across disorders cluster in two places: a threat-learning account (neuroplastic pain, limbic impairment, conditioning) and an autonomic account ("stuck in fight-or-flight", vagal tone).
This is the research agents' coding of whether a program gives one causal account for every condition it treats.
Click a column heading to sort, or a row to open the profile. The full write-up for each program is in programs/<slug>.md.