I’m rarely ill, so I’ve never given much thought to doctors. But since suffering from an achy back, I’ve begun to wonder: When you have an ongoing problem, how do you know what treatments actually work?
I pondered this as I lay in the office of an Upper East Side kinesiologist, staring at the ceiling while he rubbed two small points on my tummy.
“We’ll have you sorted out in no time,” he said cheerfully. “I’m stimulating your adrenal gland.”
Kinesiologists specialize in the connection of organs, glands and muscles to the nervous system. But could merely rubbing these two points really right a year of pain?
After all, I’d landed in this doctor’s office almost by coincidence. A friend happened to recommend him when she popped by to borrow a pair of shoes. She promised he was better than any traditional doctor.
I had to admit that the orthopedist I saw last year, after I developed an inflamed wrist from too much mouse clicking, gave me an X-ray and sent me off with physical therapy exercises (which didn’t really work).
This guy had a whole different approach. He made me wash my mouth out with a zinc liquid, tested my pH, took my blood pressure as I stood up, and checked to see if I swayed when I stood still with my eyes closed.
Then he got me to push my calf against his hand, while I applied pressure to various bits of my body.
He said he could read me like a book and that all the results of these tests pointed to the same thing. I had a deficiency of the adrenal glands, he pronounced, an off-kilter sacrum and something or other related to the “sleeve” that covered my abdomen muscles.
My treatment included the aforementioned tummy rubbing, some foot pulling while I stuck my fingers in my mouth, and his tapping on my side.
Then he cracked my back, pressed on various points in my neck, yanked my wrist, and that was pretty much it.
A week later I returned for the same sequence of tapping and prodding, during which he said I looked better already.
Sometimes I think I am better; then I wonder if it’s all in my mind.
Was this doctor at the cutting edge of a great new approach to illness or would a traditional doctor or, indeed, a couple of expert massages have made me feel just as good?
It seems there are so many different therapies and approaches to the same problems, it’s impossible work out which one is the best. And that’s before you address the fact that some doctors are simply better than others.
Fortunately, I’ve never had to worry about this before. But my roommate Suzy has. She’s plagued by nightmarish headaches and has tried everything to sort them out. Her regular doctor simply dismisses her as a migraine sufferer and offers painkillers that cost $45 a pop.
She went to a Chinese medic who made her hold test tubes containing different potions in one hand and stick her other arm out like a tea pot.
Some of the test-tube contents were supposed to magically draw in her outstretched arm and indicate what she was allergic to. Suzy didn’t eat dried fruit, dairy products, Marmite, bananas or drink alcohol for a year. But the headaches didn’t stop.
Then she tried a woman who ran an electric current through her body to “discover her mineral deficiencies.”
Another tested her muscle reactions and concluded her liver had been poisoned by a faulty yellow fever injection when she was a child. I’m not quite sure how the specialist worked that one out, but she told Suzy everything she ate was poisoning her – and to give up drink.
Then a woman in Australia put her hands on Suzy’s head and told her to imagine different colors oozing out of her body. She was supposed to do this later at home, but that approach was too bonkers even for Suzy.
What Suzy says makes her most depressed is that each time she sees a new specialist who confidently diagnoses what she has, she gets excited that her headaches will go.
Then, after diligently following those bizarre regimens, Suzy just becomes more disheartened when a fresh headache hits her.
Problem is, if nothing works do you simply give up, or do you become more ready to believe in things that initially sound mad?
Suzy says she’s now stuck on a roller coaster of extraordinary doctoring in which there’s no way of telling what will and won’t help.
I sometimes look at all her bottles of weird pills and secretly think she’s nuts. But now that I have a pain of my own, I realize there’s a great temptation to try anything that might make it go away.
Luckily, I’m still at the excited stage of my treatment and am confident it will work.
But if it doesn’t, what will I be prepared to try next? How far down the quacky medicine route will I be prepared to go?