| Most people probably wouldn’t turn to the Yellow Pages for a miracle, but Ann Hunter couldn’t think of anywhere else to look. The Northwest Valley Resident had consulted nearly 20 doctors on how to treat the nerve disorder that had hindered her ability to walk and kept her in constant pain for almost half a year. Hunter had exhausted the traditional medical pathways. Now it was time to consider an alternative method of healing. The accident In January, Hunter was in Washington visiting her brother, who lives in a town about 85 miles north of Seattle. She was walking down the street when her life changed. “I was going to some shop to look at something and, suddenly, I slipped, tripped or something,” she said. “I flew up in the air and landed on my left side.” The fall rendered her unconscious. “When I woke up” she remembered, “someone was telling me to get out of traffic.” She accomplished that by rolling toward the curb. “Immediately after I rolled, I thought I can’t move my toes,” Hunter said. Two hours passed before Hunter was examined in a hospital emergency room. Attending physicians didn’t solidify a diagnosis: they took a look at her swollen left ankle and said it was either broken or sprained. Her left knee was also sprained. It wasn’t until three weeks later, as she lay in a hospital bed in Seattle, that doctors told her she had reflex sympathetic dystrophy, or RSD. RSD is a syndrome of widespread pain in a limb, often burning in character. Usually, it occurs following an injury. It can develop in any limb, but is most frequent in the hand and shoulder or in the knee and ankle. There are three stages in the disorder, according to Dr. Nelson Hendler, clinical director of the Mensana Clinic in Stevenson, Md. “The first stage is where the limb is very cold and/or hot and is exquisitely sensitive to temperature changes and touch,” Hendler said. “Specifically, what happens in this stage is that things that are normally not painful become painful-opening the refrigerator and having the cold air come out and hit you, for example. “In the second stage, the skin changes; it becomes purple or blue or a mixture of both. The person loses the hair from the affected limb, and the arm or leg begins to swell. “In the third stage, the nails grow (at an uncontrollable rate),” the doctor continued. “The third stage is where the spinal cord neurons fuse so that the condition in the limb becomes permanent.” In about 10 percent of cases, the condition can spread to other limbs at the third stage, Hendler said. “In that case, it’s living death; they don’t die-they just have horrible pain for the rest of their lives.” There’s no telling the amount of time it takes for a person to get from one stage to another, Hendler said. “It’s highly individualized to each person,“ he noted. “Some people get to stage three in a month, where others never reach it. So the stages are not based on how long you have the disease, but how bad the disease has become.” “My foot was atrophying and, by the time I got to Seattle, I couldn’t move my leg,” Hunter said. By week’s end, the hospital staff had her up on her bad foot, “but I couldn’t do turns,” she said. Hunter walked for about three weeks, but then the foot started turning toward her upper body, straining to achieve a 90-degree angle with her anklebone. The foot started turning black. At that point, 41-year old said “I’m getting the hell out of this State; all I’ve had here is bad luck.” She moved to Arizona in March. For a while, she kept the doctors busy, going to family practitioners, podiatrists, neurologists, even a vascular surgeon. Most couldn’t tell her much, although the vascular surgeon told her she’d never walk again and recommended cutting the sympathetic nerve – a surgical procedure that would give her a chance of alleviating the pain. | | “So I still had a 50-percent chance of having pain if the nerve was cut, and I’d never walk again,” she said angrily. “That’s modern medicine’s way of dealing with this, because not much is known about the disease.” She even went to an RSD specialist in Arizona, Dr. Ellison Herro, who confirmed she had the disease and told her she was between the second and third stages. “He gave me pain blocks in the back four different times, and it didn’t work; nothing worked for the pain,” she said. It got to the point one day, Hunter said, when she called Herro’s office for an appointment, that a nurse told here there was “nothing else” the doctor could do for her. Calls made this week to Herro’s office to confirm Hunter’s account were not returned as of press time. According to Hunter, she was already a Stage 3 RSD patient at that time. She said Herro knew. He knew she was at the point of no return. And he didn’t tell her. The alternative Made desperate by pain, Hunter kept seeking medical help. A call she made to Strong Medical Group in Phoenix provided her with an indirect lifeline. “I talked to the office manager and she asked me, Have you ever tried hypnosis?” Hunter hadn’t, but, by this point, she was game for anything. She picked up the Yellow Pages and started poring through the “H” section. And then she saw the ad for Dr. Leo Gagnon’s practice. “It said, ‘Miracles on Demand,’“ Hunter remembered. Hunter decided a miracle was just what the doctor ordered. “When she called, the first thing out of her mouth was ‘Can you help me with pain?’“ Gagnon recalled. “I told her I usually could and asked for more information.” The hypnotherapist was not familiar with RSD, but promised he’d read up on it and get back to her. “One of the thing that stood out drastically is that they talk about a neurosynaptic reaction that does not occur at some level,” Gagnon said. “And none of it points to a physical or physiological problem – in fact, it keeps pointing to a psychosomatic problem.” Gagnon doesn’t usually make house calls but, as Hunter said that getting from her bed to the couch was an excruciating experience, he agreed to come to her apartment. That was on May 17. He looked at her foot, “Indeed, just like the book said, ‘it was beginning to atrophy’, the skin was blackening and the toenails were starting to get gnarled.” She asked him to touch her foot, so he could have an idea of her pain. “When he did, I nearly jumped through the roof.” Hunter said. “It was like childbirth 100 times over.” “As I visited with her, the more she talked, the more she confirmed what I’d already learned from researching – and she was already in the third stage of RSD.” Hunter told him about the surgical offer one doctor had put on the table to clip the sympathetic nerve. Gagnon didn’t believe that would offer her any relief. “I figured she might have ‘phantom limb pain’, you know it’s what happens when a limb is amputated and the person ‘feels pain’ there, even after it’s gone,” he said. “The pain isn’t always at the area that is cut, but five feet up. Let’s put it this way; if you don’t perceive pain, you don’t have it.” Hunter agreed to submit to a hypnotherapy session “to alleviate pain and help her get back in mental contact with her foot,” Gagnon said. “When I was | working, I wasn’t saying, ‘You aren’t going to have anymore pain,’ but I was-saying, ‘You’ll be comfortable. Let go of the tension in the foot; let the blood start flowing again,’ that kind of thing.” “The session took roughly half an hour,” Hunter said, “He asked, How do you feel?” the patient remembered. “I was so relaxed; there was no headache, no pain, nothing.” Again Gagnon touched the afflicted left foot. “There was no pain,” Hunter said. “A couple of minutes later, the color was returning. Exactly 10 minutes later, I could move my toes.” Later that day, she was taking tentative steps. Months after the session, as she talked to The Prospector, she demonstrated her prowess as she pedaled an exercise bike in her apartment complex workout room. “In our society, we’re taught to believe that if someone’s a specialist, get two opinions and it’s enough,” she said, stopping to rest her elbows on the bike handlebars. “It’s never enough. Get opinions. If you don’t hear what you want, go someplace else.” “The results were startling to all of us,” Gagnon admitted. “By all accounts, this was a hopeless woman. When she hurt that ankle, all she had to do was think about how much it hurt, and I would probably guess that was the major link that caused the ongoing and continuing pain I don’t have any research to prove that, but that would be my guess.” A professional opinion Hypnotherapy may have helped Ann Hunter, but there’s on thing of which Hendler is certain; She didn’t have RSD. Hendler said he should know; he has written three books, 28 medical textbook chapters and 49 articles for medical literature on the subject. He is on faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, the director of clinical research for RSD of America, a national non-profit organization and clinical director of Mensana Clinic in Stevenson, Md. – listed in Business Week as one of the eight best pain treatment centers in the country. “It’s impossible for RSD to be cured by hypnosis, so her diagnosis was incorrect.” Hendler said. “And I also hasten to add that 70 percent, of the patients diagnosed with RSD don’t have it. “In my review of the literature, looking at surgical treatment for RSD, cure rates range from 12 (percent) to 97 percent,” the doctor continued. “What that tells me is people are having a hard time telling what RSD is.” “Of course, I’ve never seen this particular case, but it’s highly unlikely she had RSD. It sounds like she had a pretty severe strain or sprain or damage to the ankle.” Still, Hunter is sticking to her guns. “I saw the leading expert in Arizona on RSD (Herro), and he said I had it. One thing you learn in alternative medicine is there can be 15 letters behind (doctor’s) names, but (Hendler) never saw me; he never saw the foot,” she said. “And I think for him to say I never had it – well, I think there are miracles, and I think that’s what it was.” Hunter is now studying to become a hypnotherapist. “I saw 20 doctors who won’t even talk to me again because they’re afraid of it; they don’t know what to do. It changed my career. It changed my life I’m walking.” |
|
