This page of the blog is a fictitious story. The story would probably fit about a hundred thousand kids in the U.S. though. It is not a true story, but it reads like one.
I met a kid this week here in San Diego. She is in her early teens. When she was younger she complained to her father of neck pain. He took her to the doctor and the doctor gave her some pain pills. The father did not take her to the chiropractor. This past week she was involved in a bad car accident, and her folks brought her in to see me, that is how we met.
Back when she was younger the doctors gave her pills to cover a bit of the pain, and then because the problem had not been fixed, it started to spread. The parts of her spine that were imobile, began to cause other parts of her spine to take up the motion (this is what I think happened). Those other joints had to take more stress and force and began to have problems too.
Then she started to have more back pain, lower back pain, mid back pain and on and on.
Then because the nerves in her neck were being compressed, the messages did not make it from her neck to her arms, a common chiropractic problem. Her arm muscles were not as healthy, and then she began to get pains in them.
Her skull became stuck to her top vertebrae, another chiropractic problem, and this began to possibly effect her brain stem, and the nerves leading up to the outside of her head. She than began to get headaches.
Each time she would get worse, they would take her for more drugs.
The doctors were happy to give her more and more, and stronger and stronger drugs.
The doctors did lots of tests, but could never find anything wrong.
Most doctors I have met and trained, have never studied even the most basic part of a chiropractic exam, which is finding the bones and seeing if they are straight or twisted, stuck or moving.
Then one doctor diagnosed her as having fibromyalgia.
Wikipedia quotes that fibromyalgia is diagnosed by the following test:
Tender points — there are 18 designated possible tender points.
(There is nothing majical about these points, they are simply points where we more commonly feel pain)
During diagnosis, “force” is exerted at each of the 18 points; the patient must feel pain at 11 or more of these points for fibromyalgia to be considered.
So this means that if you are sore in a lot of places, you may have fibromyalgia!
This in my opinion is an example of a not real diagnosis. A real diagnosis finds the cause of the problem, and not just a description of symptoms with a name.
Well..back to the story! Now that she had a diagnosis, the doctors gave her stronger and stronger drugs including anti seizure drugs, and drugs that changed the chemistry of her nerves and brain. (Of course they never took a sample of her brain chemicals to see if there was a problem.)
The drugs started to effect her. Growing up in Sun Valley California in the 70’s there was one thing I saw a lot of, and that was kids on lots of different drugs!
We had a name for those kids. We called them stoners. They looked as if they were made of stone. They would just sit there, mouths hanging open staring straight ahead.
The girl in our story was on lots and lots of drugs given to her by her doctors.
She knew something was just not right.
Well, every symptom our fictitious girl in our story has, can be caused by chiropractic problems. I am not saying every person with every problem will be fixed by chiropractic, but I will tell you I have seen a lot of kids on a lot of drugs get better with chiropractic, and then have their medical doctors take them off of drugs, and seen the kids fly through life!
How does this story end? I will let you write your own ending, but if you want to read more, here is an article that partially inspired today’s story,
A cool M.D. talks about kids on drugs
and here are some interesting letters to read