The “Medical Excuse” Diagnosis

By Sid Mouk, D.C.

“Nothing can be done to help you because you have _______________ and it’s incurable.”

I recently spoke with a nurse who was having problems with her hair falling out in large amounts. She has been through many difficult situations in her life and, therefore, told me she thought it was due to “stress.” This is typical medical thinking (the way we’ve all been “programmed” to think in the past). And I’m sure this would probably be the “diagnosis” most MD’s would give her once they knew the circumstances-especially if the tests they run are negative, which they so often are. This would be a quick and easy medical diagnosis and the MD would then be able to say “There’s nothing that can be done for you. Just take this Prozac, Valium, etc… forever and it will help you deal with the stress in your life.” A convenient excuse as to why medicine could do nothing to help her and a convenient way of holding on to patients and preventing them from looking into other avenues of healing.

Here is her background: This young lady has been trying to lose a great deal of weight so she has been eating, at the most, one meal a day (and often that is of questionable quality-refined carbohydrates, etc…). Working at a hospital, she drinks large amounts of coffee each day (often up to 24 cups a day in the recent past). She has also been involved in several auto accidents, some of which involved serious injuries, and was given the usual medical treatment to simply cover up her symptoms-in other words, nothing was done to take care of the resulting spinal problems. So, in all likelihood, this patient would have become simply another reason for the drug industry to rejoice – she would be on expensive, dangerous drugs for the rest of her life.

Another man was referred to a psychologist by a local psychiatrist for the treatment of chronic depression. The psychiatrist had been treating this patient for 5 long years with little or no results. The patient was told that he was “resisting therapy”, therefore there was nothing the psychiatrist could do for him except give him more drugs – forever. The psychologist immediately began to delve into this man’s diet and discovered the patient was addicted to Pepsi-Cola and had been drinking a case a day of the beverage for many years (with 8-12 teaspoons of refined sugar in each bottle). Over that 5 year period, the psychiatrist had not once asked him about his diet. The psychologist immediately sent him to a Chiropractor for care, took steps to get him off the soft drinks, and began to work with him using NLP. Within 4 weeks his depression was totally gone.

A 38 year old patient came to me about a year ago with very severe sciatic pain down his right leg. He’d had this condition for more than 4 years and surgery had only made the condition worse. He’d been told by his MDs that nothing could be done, that he would be on strong narcotic drugs for the rest of his life, and that he would “just have to learn to live with it.” He flatly refused to take the drugs but, instead, he would “drink myself into a stupor every night in order to get any sleep at all.” Six weeks of Chiropractic care cleared his pain completely and he is continuing periodic care to fix his problem.

Are we going to abandon patients like these to a life of dependence on dangerous and costly drugs? How many millions of patients are out there right now just waiting for someone to tell them that there is hope? That there is help available? That there is Chiropractic? It’s all up to us!

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Sid Mouk, D.C.
Baton Rouge, LA
e-mail: [email protected]