Information about RECOUP by people who have actually been there
Stephen
I attended RECOUP for about three months during the summer of 2007.
While I did experience some improvements from my treatments, I was far from cured. I continued to experience further improvements after I left from other therapies such as active release technique and chiropractic treatment. It could be argued that my time with RECOUP laid the foundations for further improvements.
However, even with the improvement I did receive, I cannot recommend RECOUP to other RSI sufferers. This is primarily because many of the talented and caring people who treated me were fired shortly after I left because they themselves were developing RSI from abusive working conditions treating patients like me for 12-hour shifts, six days a week.
Since leaving the clinic, I have found equally or more knowledgeable people in loosening my arms and neck simply by visiting good sports massage therapists or active release practitioners.
There are a few additional things you should know before considering a journey to RECOUP:
1) the treatment is terribly painful. I mean the kind of pain where pulling out your hair is a welcome distraction. Imagine this for three hours a day seven days a week. However, if you are like me this is a small price to pay for relief. Given that I had three months of seven day a week treatment, I would've expected more of an improvement than I did see.
2) Stress has been shown to have a negative impact with your symptoms. India and RECOUP are by no means stress free. In fact if you're used to Western-style treatment, you may find your experience in India terribly frustrating. It's noisy, polluted and wonderfully chaotic. During my time there, they proudly upgraded their service to change the sheets that the patients lie on from once a day to twice a day. ( Imagine lying in a small, hot, cramped cubicle on a sheet that has the previous patient's fresh armpit stains on it.) If you have an open mind, you may enjoy it. If you like things just so, you will be frustrated. Terribly frustrated.
3) Despite the fact that Dr. Sharan has experience with treating RSI patients, it is not the only thing he does. In fact of the dozens of patients treated everyday at the clinic, only a couple foreign RSI patients will be treated. Despite a smattering of ergonomics and yoga and other things, primarily his treatment consists of trigger point therapy over and over and over again. This is not a specialized RSI boot camp clinic. This is just another potential tool in your arsenal to help you with combating RSI.
4) The therapists themselves, despite being bored out of their skulls, are for the most part genuinely caring. However, when you start to see deeper into the management of the clinic, you see disturbing and shady practices. I find it difficult to recommend a clinic that can so easily turn on its former patients and staff. Play the game and you'll do fine. Go against their wishes and be prepared to have vital documents like receipts, doctor diagnosis and other things threatened to be withheld from you.
5) Most importantly, I found the answer and it's not RECOUP and it's not trigger point therapy. I have discovered a therapy that has made more difference in my life than anything else. I have tried everything under the sun taking multiple treatments a week for years.
After starting on this new treatment, I experienced more improvement in one month than I had combined over years of treatments. After one week, I played an intense video game (Command and Conquer 3) for 2 hours with only minor discomfort. The week previous I was using voice recognition and mousing only when necessary.
What is it?
It's a very difficult treatment to understand and accept because it flies in the face of everything you've been taught. I was suffering from TMS as described by Dr. Sarno. The short version is repressed unconscious emotions cause physical changes in the body to distract you from examining how you really feel. It sounds like hippie new-age bullshit but I've had more improvement from examining my insides than I ever had from having my outsides worked on.
For more information, view the TMS page on this site
If you find yourself hesitant to accept the TMS cure stories, take heart. I originally discovered TMS from a Dr. Sarno book lent by a friend while at RECOUP and it took me over 1.5 years to fully accept it. Perhaps it's coincidence but my improvement seems to be directly correlated to my slow increase in confidence that I have TMS and not RSI. In early 2009, I accepted it fully and my improvement was dramatic after that.
All in all, I wish I could recommend RECOUP. I did enjoy my time there and did receive some improvement but I doubt they have enough skilled therapists remaining and there are just too many dubious practices. Plus, trigger point therapy just doesn't have as high an effectiveness rate as TMS.
PS - This whole story was originally dictated via voice recognition software. RECOUP was unable to get me to the point of being able to easily type again. However, after discovering TMS, I've updated all this happily typing with no pain at all!