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.”
“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.