The Commerce of Fibromyalgia

Have you ever read The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle?  If you have not, you should.  It is a wickedly comic novel written by the most entertaining of contemporary American writers.  This whole business with Dr. Whitcomb, and his Lake Tahoe clinic, and his false promises of a cure for Fibromyalgia is reminiscent of it.

The real-life Dr. John Harvey Kellogg is fictionalized into one of the main characters in Boyle’s The Road to Wellville.  You might know Dr. Kellogg from the Corn Flakes you crunch occasionally for breakfast.  Yes, that most famous of breakfast cereals was actually invented by a doctor obsessed with healthful living.  T.C. Boyle’s fictitious story takes place at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which was a popular health retreat in the late eighteen to mid nineteen hundreds, run under the controlling and obsessive eye of Dr. Kellogg.

In the thirty-one years of his directorship, Dr. Kellogg had transformed the San (…) to the “Temple of Health” it had now become, a place celebrated from coast to coast – and across the great wide weltering Atlantic to London, Paris, Heidelberg and beyond.  Twenty-eight hundred patients annually passed through its portals, and one thousand employees, including twenty fulltime physicians and three hundred nurses and bath attendants, saw to their needs.  Six stories high, with a gleaming lobby half the size of a football field, with four hundred rooms and treatment facilities for a thousand, with elevators, central heating and cooling, indoor swimming pools, and a whole range of therapeutic diversions and wholesome entertainments, the San was the sine qua non of the cure business – luxury hotel, hospital and spa all rolled into one.

 

And the impresario, the overseer, the presiding genius behind it all, was John Harvey Kellogg.  Preaching dietary restraint and the simple life, he eased overweight housewives and dyspeptic businessmen along the path to enlightenment and recovery.  Sever cases – the cancerous, the moribund, the mentally unbalanced and the disfigured – were rejected.  The San’s patients tended to be of a certain class, and they really had no interest in sitting across the dining table from the plebian or the pedestrian or those who had the bad grace to be truly and dangerously ill.  No, they came to the San to see and be seen; to mingle with the celebrated, the rich and the preposterously rich; to think positively, eat wisely and subdue their afflictions with a good long pious round of pampering, abstention and rest.  (Boyle 6-7)

So was the Battle Creek Sanitarium through the lens of the fictitious Dr. Kellogg.  But the characters in the novel had a very different point of view. 

After weeks of diet consisting of Bean Tapioca, Corn Pulp and Gluten Mush; and exotic treatments including shock therapy, laughter exercises, and daily enemas, the only thing patients were relieved of was their wallets.  The “positive thinking” Kellogg boasts of, was fostered by a controlled environment in which husbands were separated from wives, and each patient went through their daily routine under constant surveillance from their personal “attendants.”  All to keep order and control, and to make sure the San’s image was never tarnished.  Never mind the man shocked to death during his sinusoidal bath. Mention of that was almost as taboo as participation in anything carnal.

In The Road to Wellville, T.C. Boyle shines a bright and comical light on commercialism in the healthcare industry.  It is a fact, and it is nothing new.  Every time I see a commercial for the new Fibromyalgia wonder drug, Lyrica, I wince.  Not because of the drug itself, but because now that Fibromyalgia is becoming an accepted and recognized disorder, it will also become a profitable disorder.  More and more drug companies will be coming out with prescription drugs to TREAT Fibromyalgia, but not to CURE Fibromyalgia.  Why would they want to find a cure, when the alternative is so much more lucrative?

And then there are yahoos like Dr. Whitcomb who claim to have found the cure to Fibromyalgia, but instead of publishing it in a medical journal so everyone can benefit, he lures desperate patients to his clinic and promises them a lifetime of relief in return for their life savings.  But it turns out the relief is short-term and yet their money is still gone.  If you believe so much in your miracle cure Dr. Whitcomb, why not offer a money back guarantee?  Why, because you are capitalizing on your patient’s pain and desperation.  It seems to me you have a Kellogg complex Dr. Whitcomb.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.  Let’s hear directly from one of your patients why don’t we.  The following was a comment on the blog of a former patient of Dr. Whitcomb, Darden Burns.  Mrs. Burns was instrumental in bringing a lot of this to light.  She received several comments from other patients of Dr. Whitcomb and the following was left by Robin Storms.

I am also a former patient of Dr. Whitcomb. First of all, let me say this…BUYER BEWARE…he is a very charming man and makes everyone feel like they are special and that he really cares. It took me a long time to come to the conclusion that the only thing he cares about is his bottom line. The first time I went to his clinic I spent two months there. I left Lake Tahoe thinking I was cured and continued to feel well for a month after returning home. That was it…one month…then all of my symptoms returned with a vengeance. I followed his after care instructions to the letter, but was made to feel by his staff that I must have done something to make my neck “slip” which caused the relapse. I returned for one week last December, because Dr. Whitcomb said he had a new technique that he was teaching his patients to use. With this “technique” he said his patients were staying well after returning home. What a joke. The technique is nothing more than pressing up on the occipital bone and does nothing. It was during this visit that I brought to Dr. Whitcomb’s attention that just about all of my fellow patients had relapsed. I told him about one patient, a young 33 year old women, who was using a walker again because she was so sick. He told me three times during the week that he was going to call her, but never did. That just about says it all. That second trip to his clinic was very difficult for me. I saw the hope on the faces of the patients in the waiting room that they, too, were going to be “cured”. They reminded me of the wonderful group of people I spent two months with in his clinic, many of whom are now close friends. I knew that most of them, like us, had traveled a long distance to be there and were spending money they did not have. It broke my heart to know that they were being taken advantage of by a man who knows that his patients do not stay well. With that said, Dr. Whitcomb is still advertising and traveling to promote his clinic. On a recent television program that was broadcast on a Christian television station he stated that follow up care is rarely needed. This is simply not true and he knows it. – Robin Storms

It was after reading this post that I was made to think about The Road to Wellville and similarities between Kellogg and Whitcomb.  But I may as well compare them to the big drug companies too – companies that sell expensive drugs, which often have worse side affects than the conditions they treat.  I believe many enter the healthcare profession because they want to help their patients and make a difference, but sadly there are those looking first and foremost to line their pockets.  And this is why I care about the practices of a doctor I have never met.  He may not have directly taken advantage of me, but indirectly he has taken advantage of us all.