He then looked for office space and ended up negotiating with Columbus Hospital to rent the second floor of the Fullerton-Ashland Medical Building for the Chicago Holistic Center, scheduled to open this month, organized like a regular multi-specialty medical clinic with some 45 practitioners, including four M.D.’s.
Edelberg selected the practitioners carefully, based on a detailed application and interviews. In some cases, the practitioners are licensed. Others hold certificates from the accrediting bodies of their particular discipline, such as the National Commission for Certification of Acupuncturists.
“There is a very strict medical practice act in Illinois, probably the strictest in the United States,” Edelberg says, “so those who are not in fields that are licensed in Illinois are really not going to be in a role of diagnosing and treating. They might have a role in education or working with a licensed person.”
Alternative healers come from all walks of life. But a common thread often is that they themselves have been helped by an alternative method.
Chiropractor Ray Bayley, for example, who seriously considered medical school and has worked as a medical lab technician, first “got into” Oriental medicine. Then he learned about the Alexander Technique, a method of training in posture and body use that made his own back pain disappear and gave him an extra inch of height. “I got such a sense of freedom and relaxation with my body,” he says, “and I realized what an amazing thing it was to use the body properly.”
Chiropractors fall into two divisions-so-called straights and mixers. Straights only do spinal adjustment on the theory that maladjustment of spinal vertebrae cause dysfunction of nerves, blood vessels and thereby other organs. Mixers such as Bayley, who are in the majority, don’t simply adjust the spine but also use other methods, including massage, physiotherapy and acupuncture to change the structure and functioning of the body. Bayley also offers nutritional and exercise counseling.
More than any other group, chiropractors aggressively resisted attempts to squelch their specialty and fought for the right to use X-rays and other medical procedures. They cannot perform surgery or prescribe drugs, but they are now licensed in all 50 states and receive reimbursement for their services from insurance companies and referrals from physicians.
Many patients seek out a chiropractor after they have exhausted conventional medical remedies or because they want to avoid surgery or drug therapy. Bayley, who is in practice at Healing Hands Holistic Health Center in Uptown with naprapath Elaine Stocker, says: “We’ve had lots of people with low-back pain who are told they face surgery and then come to us. Backaches and headaches are standard chiropractic stuff.”
Barbara Victor, a former astrologer and bookkeeper, started her Wellness Center in Lake View, which offers colonic irrigation, nutritional counseling, homeopathy and foot reflexology, after her own health reached its nadir. She was nearly 70 pounds overweight, had high blood pressure and generally was “feeling miserable.” She overhauled her diet, cutting out most fats, sugar and salt, got more exercise and began receiving regular colonic irrigation, a detoxification process some people swear by.
“Colonic irrigation is similar to an enema, but it goes farther,” Victor says. “We put warm, filtered water through all 5 feet of the large intestine. We let it flow in by gravity, and the peristaltic action of the bowel pushes the water out. Some people feel very empty afterward. A person who is very constipated can lose 2 to 3 pounds. There’s concern about doing it often by some people, but here we use filtered water, so there’s no chlorine to wash out useful bacteria in the colon.
“This is not alternative medicine as far as I’m concerned. This is original medicine, the stuff we used before drugs and surgery.”
A medical philosophy called homeopathy, which dates back to 1810, has been experiencing an American resurgence. It already flourishes in England (Queen Elizabeth and other royals consult a homeopathic physician), France, Greece and especially India, but it virtually disappeared in America by the late 19th Century due to pressure from organized medicine and infighting.
In simple terms, homeopathic medicine is a natural pharmaceutical system that utilizes microdoses of substances from the plant, mineral or animal kingdom to arouse a person’s natural healing response. Unlike conventional drugs, which generally act upon the physiological processes related to symptoms of disease, homeopathic medicines are thought to work by stimulating a person’s immune and defense system.
The choice of pharmaceuticals for a particular person’s symptoms is based on what is called the Law of Similars, which holds that a substance that produces a set of symptoms in a healthy person has the power to cure a sick person having those same symptoms.
For example, if a child ingests certain poisons, syrup of ipecac might be administered to induce vomiting. When healthy volunteers took ipepac, which is derived from the root of a South American plant called ipecacuhanathis, to determine its effect, they found that the mouth retained saliva, the tongue was very clean, there was a cough so severe it led to gagging and vomiting and incessant nausea not relieved by vomiting.
This “proving” gives a homeopath information about how else the plant could be used. A minute dose, prepared by a homeopathic pharmacy according to FDA guidelines, could allay the “similar” symptoms if a person were suffering from a gagging cough after a cold or a woman was experiencing morning sickness with incessant nausea not relieved by vomiting.
Dr. Joel Shepperd, who has a practice in West Rogers Park, turned to homeopathy after losing faith with conventional medicine during his internship at Cook County Hospital in the late 1960s. “I was dissatisfied with standard medicine because the results did not seem satisfactory,” he says. “You would use up a lot of energy trying to treat people and get them out of the hospital, but then a little while later they would come back with the same problems. So I thought what we were doing was stopgap medicine without really making people well.
“In regular medicine, a patient is categorized as having a certain disease, and there are only certain ways that (he) can be treated. Homeopaths are interested in what we call the characteristic unusual, peculiar symptoms-what makes one person’s disease symptoms different from everyone else’s-rather than the common symptoms. We’re generally consulted after people go to all the regular doctors and have bad experiences.
“I have a full practice, and I don’t advertise; it’s all word of mouth. First of all, I can’t see as many patients as a regular doctor because it takes more time to do. There’s no shortcut in the detail work in the information we have to take.”
An initial consultation with a homeopath can last up to two hours, and the personal contact is part of what makes it attractive. “A homeopath discusses all the facets of your life,” says Lyn Campbell, administrative assistant to the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago who started going to a homeopath because of severe headaches. “How you sleep and where. What you eat. What you wear. How your skin feels. Exercise. And from this kind of discussion he makes a diagnosis as to which remedy is best to use. They listen to you, unlike a conventional physician I used to go to who told me, `I am the teacher; you sit and listen to me,’ when I started asking questions about a treatment and its side effects.
“Homeopathy is more preventive medicine. . . . I was given a remedy, pulsatilla (windflower), that helped clear up the (headache) problem. The homeopathic remedies are much less expensive than conventional drugs-$6 or $7 for a supply that might last for a month-and they’re not synthetic.”
What attracts most people to alternative medicine is their rejection of conventional medicine’s heavy artillery: surgery and drug therapy.
Sue Pestka, 37, a customer-service representative for a mutual fund, took antibiotics for 10 years to cope with persistent upper-respiratory distress. She experienced congestion in her lungs, allergies and had colds that lasted all winter. She thought she would have to resort to drugs for the rest of her life until she happened to meet a nutritionist who suggested that food allergies might be causing her problems.
Pestka then consulted a naprapath and discovered that when she eliminated refined sugar and dairy products from her diet, her respiratory problems cleared up. So did chronic yeast infections she experienced. “Now I don’t even take aspirin,” she says. “It’s a very good feeling for me not to take drugs.”
“I prefer things that are non-invasive, not interfering with the body’s natural processes,” says Jim Ellison, 37, an IBM engineer. Ellison was initiated into the world of alternatives in 1979 when he threw his back out while playing with a Frisbee and could not stand up. “I went to an orthopedic surgeon who said I should remain immobile in bed, take drugs and then think about surgery,” he says. “After three days, I decided to see an osteopath. He adjusted my back, and the next day I was playing softball. It was a rude awakening to find out that doctors might not know what they’re talking about.”
Now Ellison says he has a sort of stable of eight practitioners that he uses to maintain his health, including an internist, dermatologist, chiropractor, naprapath and nutritionist. “It’s very upsetting to me that most M.D.’s are not interested in these other methods,” he adds. “If they were sort of holding off judgment until all the facts came in, that would be one thing. But they’re not even interested and sometimes seem threatened by it.”
Chiropractor Bayley expresses similar sentiments. He gave a speech one day to the doctors attached to an AIDS treatment unit at a university medical center. “I told them there is a simple technique where you put pressure on the abdomen a certain way that has stopped diarrhea in AIDS patients, which is a major hassle if not downright killing because they’re losing nutrients. I said, `I’ll show anyone in this room.’ But no one spoke up. Later I said that the drug AZT causes anemia and that at the AIDS clinic where I volunteer, we routinely get rid of anemia by using certain nutrients. I said, `I’d be glad to tell you how to do that.’ Again no one spoke up.
“I was upset by this. But later a doctor took me aside and said, `You don’t understand. I am an M.D., and there is an expectation legally about what I do. What I am supposed to do for AIDS is give AZT and various other things that are recognized as the proper treatment. I cannot do what you do. I risk malpractice doing that.’ Frankly, I don’t believe him, but there’s a point in that.
“I’m not going to claim that chiropractic or nutrition or Oriental medicine or anything else should be the standard. As one who has tried to learn everything, I can tell you it’s impossible. So it’s going to have to be the standard eventually that you go to a general practitioner as an executive who is familiar with all the healing styles and he tells you where to go from there.”
Such a marriage may be inevitable as the issue of health-care cost containment comes to the fore and as more open-minded physicians reach positions of influence. Edelberg’s Chicago Holistic Center and others of its kind are prime examples.
“The whole concept of holistic health care relies on an evaluation of the whole person-body and mind,” Edelberg says, “and the idea that the human body can heal itself through correct nutrition, correcting stress and possibly some agents that could stimulate the body toward wellness. It stresses the partnership of practitioner and patient or client.”
Dr. Keith Berndtson, assistant professor of family medicine and preventive medicine at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, is fond of saying that the most insidious form of quackery is the closed medical mind. “I don’t mean that to endorse willy-nilly every alternative out there without any kind of scientific, or at least conceptual, support,” he says. “But the other mistake we make is that we shut down the possibility that there may actually be some utility there.
“Let’s say it is a placebo effect (that makes people feel better from alternative treatments). Well, placebo effect is taking a bad rap. The placebo effect is obviously something happening at the level of messenger molecules, and it may be what Norman Cousins felt was the healing system in the human body. You still are not going to find `healing system’ in any medical textbook indexes, but there’s something.”
Ultimately, today’s new breed of medical consumers may be the ones who force a change in health-care delivery.
“All different kinds of people come to me-from executives and people in advertising to truckdrivers and steelworkers, artists and dancers,” says a woman who practices structural body therapy, acupuncture and herbal medicine out of her North Side home. “I’m a last resort. I get hard-core cases. A person who gets one bladder infection after another. People with back pain. Surgery might not help, and you can’t spend your life stoned on drugs for back pain.
“So many people are fed up with the results they get from mainstream medicine. Mainstream medicine is good at a lot of things. We have the finest emergency medicine in the world. Oriental medicine is best for chronic conditions. It’s really a complement to the mainstream system.
“I’ll treat people like a man, 85 years old, who had numbness in his legs from the knees down. His neurologist said nothing could be done but to put him in a wheelchair. I did acupuncture on the man and the feeling came back in his legs. His doctor was shocked that the nerves had come back, but he was genuinely interested. I get referrals from physicians now. Doctors are becoming more open.”
