Featured in The Telegraph, 16 March 2026. By Etienne Balland, as told to Susanna Galton.
At 24, Etienne was a rugby-playing osteopath with his career ahead of him. Then, after two bouts of Covid and glandular fever, he woke one morning unable to get out of bed. For the next year his parents cared for him at home. He couldn’t walk to the bathroom unaided, struggled to finish sentences, and was told test after test that nothing was wrong.
About a year into his illness, he got in touch with a university friend, Elliot Nation, Senior TMS Practitioner at Naya Health. Elliot explained how the brain can amplify normal signals from the body into exhaustion, pain and brain fog, and how rTMS works on those brain circuits.
Etienne describes feeling his energy and mood begin to shift within weeks. He went on to return to part-time work, travel on his own, and eventually feel, in his words, “90 per cent back to normal”. When he relapsed, he returned to Naya for further treatment, this time personalised with heart-brain coupling.
“TMS has given me a lifeline; it is a tool I know I can use again,” he writes.
Read Etienne’s story in The Telegraph
Individual experiences vary. The evidence for rTMS in chronic fatigue is emerging.
