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Here are more doctor testimonials. It is both
surprising and great that so many MD's are now not afraid to put
their name on a testimonial or a patient use testimonial. I really
wish I could have found this information as far back as the 1970's
when medical practioeers started to get this information out with
more vigor. It could have very well saved me over 20 years of
aggravation.
Letter to Editor of Clinical Practice of Alternative Medicene
by a practicing bypass surgeon.
John Ettl, M.D.,
an El Paso, Texas chelationist, was also his own first EDTA patient.
A rock hobbyist, he discovered he was suffering near-fatal levels of
lead toxicity thanks to his hobby of casting unusual specimens.
"I had all the usual symptoms -
irritability, anxiety, and temper, sleeplessness, forgetfulness,
mental disorientation, blurred vision and poor hearing but thought
they were age-related problems, though I was only in my mid-50's.
"Fortunately for me,
Dr. Harold Harper,
a pioneer doctor in this field, convinced me it was lead poisoning -
not mid-life crisis - and told me to read up on the treatment of
choice, chelation. As a pathologist, I was extremely wary of the
potential dangers, and went about it very cautiously.
"I began slowly, but eventually gave
myself over 200 treatments before I got my lead levels down to
normal. By that time, i was symptom-free, and a chelation expert."
Dr. John Parks Trowbridge
in Humble, Texas, learned about chelation therapy from is 70-year
old father who'd read about it in a health magazine. The elder
Trowbridge wanted his son to look into EDTA because he'd suffered an
aortic aneurysm and had other serious circulatory problems.
Young John, just emerging from a surgical
residency in urology, responded predictably. "Forget it. it's
quackery. if it was any good, wouldn't I have heard of it? Wouldn't
the medical journals publish reports on a marvelous way to reverse
atherosclerosis? Wouldn't doctors be using it?"
It wasn't until several years later that
Dr. Trowbridge, a bit older - a lot wiser - was embarrassed to
remember those hasty, cocky words. His parents had grown older, too
- and sicker when a chance meeting with physician/nutritionist/chelationist
Robert Haskell, M.D. encouraged him to take a second look. What Dr.
Haskell showed Dr. Trowbridge amazed him - medical records of
recovered patients whose test readings and clinical exams proved
beyond doubt how much they'd benefited from chelation treatments.
Still only partially convinced, Dr.
Trowbridge flew from one chelation clinic to another to check things
out - to Alabama, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, California. He made dozens
of stops in as many cities, as he criss-crossed the country in
search of more data.
"Every chelation doctor I visited was so
enthusiastic about what he was doing, and so eager to open his
patient files, I could no longer question effectiveness. Cabinets
full of case histories clearly showed chelation therapy was a
revolutionary method for overcoming degenerative disease. It blew my
mind!"
No question as to Dr. Trowbridge's motives
when he changed from critic to advocate. The first patients he
chelated were Claire and Jack Trowbridge, his mom and dad.
Dr. Harold Huffman
of Hinton, Virginia, is another doctor whose first chelation patient
was good old dad.
"It was 1982, and my father, 70 years old
at the time, was a diabetic, suffering from diabetic retinopathy,
and had already lost one foot because of gangrene and was facing the
loss of the other. A physician himself, he knew the prognosis was
not good. I called a nurse in Indiana who knew a lot about
alternative medicine, and asked her what we could do. She
recommended chelation and I say 'what's that?'
"She filled me in on the fine details. I
learned how to do it, and while I wasn't convinced it was any good,
knew it was dad's only hope of avoiding a second amputation.
"Talk about reluctant - I don't remember
which one of us had more qualms, him or me. But we sure went into it
with our fingers crossed - and were more surprised than anyone when
the treatments worked. it saved his remaining leg - even restored
his eyesight - and he continued practicing medicine for five more
years."
Dr. Ronald Hoffman
of New York City, an outspoken advocate of holistic medicine, looked
into chelation after having dinner with a talkative nurse.
"Throughout the meal, this lady regaled me
with tales of miracle cures: patients who'd been brought back from
the brink of death and were now symptom-free and one hard-to-believe
story after another about people whose legs had been saved from
amputation. I couldn't get her to talk about anything else.
"I thought, either this dame's a nut - or
chelation is worth a closer look. I decided to investigate and
discovered everything this lady said was the absolute truth. That
was nine years ago, and I've been practicing chelation ever since."
Skeptical from the outset,
Dr. Terry Chappell
of Blufton, Ohio, latched onto chelation after listening carefully
to what people told him.
"I was nagged into it (chelation) by a
patient," he admits, telling about "an important local honcho. This
executive of a very large corporation had been traveling for more
than 11 hours each way to get chelation treatments from the nearest
doctor he could find. Since he didn't want to spend all that time on
the road, he kept after me, pestering me every other day to insist I
check it out.
"I wasn't terribly interested, but I
wasn't hopelessly doctrinaire, either. I was mildly curious about
nutrition, meditation, hypnosis - things like that. This guy was so
persistent, I gave in, and visited several chelation doctors. Once I
checked things out, I had no choice. Chelation works and here I am."
David Freeman, M.D.
of North Hollywood, California is yet another non-believer who was
dragged into chelation, protesting all the way that he could NOT get
involved with quackery.
"A dozen years ago, I'd have sworn this
chelation was a bunch of garbage. I was well up on the conventional
medical literature, and believed what I read: 'no proven value',
'fraudulent claims', 'anecdotal evidence from unreliable source'.
Who needed it!
"As it turned out, many of my patients
thought THEY needed it - a lot. One after another, they began
bugging me to look into it. I turned thumbs down.
"Then, as luck would have it, an old
medical school chum visited me. I knew this guy was a solid scholar,
totally reliable with a sterling intellect and unquestionably
ethical. We'd interned together, and I'd trust this doc with my
life. When he started praising chelation, spinning astonishing tales
of miracle cures, I just had to listen. Since then, I've learned a
lot - about chelation, and what it means to be labeled a 'quack'.
When we asked
Dr. Irby Fox
of Abilene, Texas how he came to choose chelation as a treatment, he
said, "It was an accident. A patient who had a bypass that failed,
was in pretty bad shape, and begged me to chelate him.
"I hedged a lot. I don't know anything
about this, I told him. But I'll check it out, and if that's what
you want, I'll do it, provided you sign an agreement that if your
wife, kids or their relatives sue, I can use your estate to defend
myself.
"I was being pretty cautious, but once I
got started, I couldn't stop. This first guy got well; the next
chelated patient did also. It's incredible. I really didn't want to
get interested in anything so controversial - I'm no hero. The real
heroes are the patients who insist on being chelated despite all the
bad things their doctors say about it.
Dr. John Schwent
of Festus, Missouri was a conservative main-stream physician until
he lost several young patients only a short time after undergoing
bypass surgery.
"It was frustrating," he recalls, "to send
thirty- and forty year-olds off for bypasses only to have them die
in a couple of years."
Then Mrs. Schwent's best friend, an
attorney, began having angina attacks and instead of bypass surgery,
opted for chelation treatments and the results were fantastic. He
got well!
"I got a book about chelation and sat us
all night reading it. One of my classmates, a Chuck Curtis, was
mentioned in the book, so I called him. 'Are you practicing this
voodoo medicine?' He laughed and said, 'For eight years now' and
when I asked him, 'Killed anyone yet?' he got serious and replied,
'No, but if you've got two weeks to spare, I can use ever minute
telling you great stories about the lives I've saved.'
"I wound up spending an entire year
visiting chelation clinics all over the United States. Then I took
the ACAM course and still didn't give the first treatment. I was
very reluctant to get into it. I knew that introducing chelation
into my practice would jeopardize my professional standing, and
perhaps lead to my being ostracized. In spite of it all, I had to go
ahead. I wouldn't be honest to know how to cure people and refuse to
do it."
Dr. James Swann
of Independence is a "show me, I'm from
Missouri" sort of physician.
"I first heard about chelation in 1973 at
a Jackson County Medical Society meeting when a Dr. Paul Williams,
the author of two medical textbooks, tried to educate us on its
usefulness for atherosclerosis. Nobody in the room knew anything
about it - we couldn't even spell it.
"The lecture over, I hung around to chat
with Paul, and it surprised me to learn that the American Journal of
Cardiology had published favorable reports on this treatment. It
bothered me that almost no one was following up, investigating, or
using it." Dr. Swann's movement of decision came when a close friend
whose triple bypass had failed (all three grafts had closed) only
four months after surgery, came to visit. She'd been sent home to
die, but had heard of chelation and there she and her husband sat,
in Dr. Swann's living room, begging for the treatment.
"'Lill,' I said 'I sure would like a
better cause than you to practice on. You're going to die on me, and
we'll all look bad.'
"She was a spunky rascal. When she said,
'I'd rather die trying, than die doing nothing,' she got to me. I
said 'OK. If you're willing, I am.'
"We started her out on three chelation
treatments a week. That was twenty years ago, and she's alive today
and still going strong. That's the case that brought me around."
It would be hard to find a more
conservative physician than Dr.
Conrad ("Connie") Maulfair, Jr. of
Mertztown, Pennsylvania. A farm boy and Pennsylvania Dutchman,
reared in the lad of the Amish, you can imagine his reaction when a
patient brought him an article about chelation in a holistic-type
magazine published - where else? - in California. He snorted. He
sneered. He said, "What can you expect from those west coast
loonies?" He dismissed the idea without a second thought. But then
came a second, third, fourth patient - all asking questions about
chelation, all bringing books and articles, or as Connie put it,
"telling tall tales."
True to his heritage, Dr. M refused to be
"pushed." For six years, he shrugged the subject off, before coming
around to investigate for himself. That was ten years ago, and now
he not only treats patients, he trains other doctors how to
administer EDTA infusions properly.
Dr. Milton Fried
of Atlanta, Georgia, insists that he never
set out to be a rebel.
"I'm very thin-skinned and hate doing
anything than exposes me to criticism - BUT - on the other hand, I'd
feel worse not doing what I know to be best for patients.
"I was a resident in a New York hospital
when a patient with a blue leg and gangrene of the toes and foot,
was scheduled for amputation. When he told us he was going to get
chelated instead, we warned him that it was bunk, and advised
against it. He got chelated anyhow, and weeks later came back with
the leg healed, and just lorded it over us.
"The other docs ignored the whole thing,
but I thought 'Hey, wait a minute. There's something to this.' I
started studying chelation. That was the easy part. Working up the
chutzpah to do it was tough. I knew it meant parting company with
the 'respectable' docs, taking a lot of flack, jeopardizing my
reputation and income. It was a hard decision - but I had to do it.
"I've never been sorry. I got a lot of 'nachis'
- that's Yiddish for 'pride and satisfaction." I'll tell you what
makes me mad - all the doctors who come to me for chelation when
they get sick - or send their wives, friends, relatives - and never
let it be known. They tell me, "I wish I had your nerve." I tell
them they're gutless wonders."
Dr. Gerald Parker
of Amarillo, Texas, says Dr. Fried is the perfect example of
chelation doctors who should be proud to be called 'quacks'.
"There's a fine breed of 'Quacks' -
they're the rare medical birds who are not satisfied with what
they're taught in medical school and are willing to explore new
approaches. These 'quacks' become frustrated when they can't help a
patient recover, and they look for a better way."
Excerpted from
"Forty Something Forever:" A CONSUMER'S GUIDE TO CHELATION THERAPY AND
OTHER HEART-SAVERS by Harold and Arline Brecher, Co-authors of
"Bypassing
Bypass"
Go here to find
chelation doctors.
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