Alternative Advances: Fixing Fibromyalgia
Reported May 11, 2005
WATERBURY, Conn. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) — There’s often a battle among doctors about the value of alternative medicine. But one physician has a foot in both worlds and is hoping that can save some of his patients from a lifetime of pain.
Three years ago, Jeanne Langlais couldn’t pick up a brush to fulfill her favorite pastime. “Couldn’t paint anymore,” she says. “I couldn’t lift my arms up. Your thighs ached when you stood up, my arms ached, my neck ached. I couldn’t understand why.”
Langlais also could not exercise. The chronic muscle pain forced her into early retirement. After two years of tests, she finally got the diagnosis: fibromyalgia. But finding a treatment was another story. “Anti-inflammatories, pain killers, anti-depressants, and none of them worked for me.”
She sought an alternative treatment called intravenous micronutrient therapy. IVMT is a cocktail of highly concentrated vitamins injected into the vein. Langlais says: “About the 5th treatment I started to feel better, and by the 6th treatment I had no pain. I was clicking my heels.”
David Katz, M.D., a Yale-trained physician, is one of a few doctors using IVMT. He’s treated more than 60 patients so far. About 80 percent of them have had good results.
“If I’m able to help patients who for years have suffered and couldn’t find help — it doesn’t get any better than that,” says Dr. Katz, who is now a preventive medicine specialist at Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center in Derby, Conn.
He is conducting a clinical trial on IVMT sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. He says the treatment has few side effects, but a major drawback is cost. It’s not covered by insurance … not yet, at least.
“If we prove that this is a cost-effective therapy for fibromyalgia, it then becomes a reimbursable commodity,” Dr. Katz tells Ivanhoe.
For Langlais, the $55-weekly injections are a hardship. But she’ll continue them, she says, because of the promising picture they paint for a future without pain.
