Advanced CNS
{Central Nervous System} Restoration Institute
Chronic Fatigue Clinic of Denver,
Colorado
www.drmccarty.com 720-200-9317
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Thank
You for coming to our site. Our clinic is the
only Chronic Fatigue clinic in the U.S. that uses Advanced CNS Restoration,
Neuro Structural Integration Technique, Nimmo, Regular Cranial Work, and
Condyle Lift and spread. Using the
combination of FIVE techniques, which each have their own method of
correcting the Skull bones, we have a 80% success rate correcting Chronic
Fatigue within 12 months. AFTER
reading the "Frequently Asked Questions" page (at the bottom of the
TMJ page) feel free to drop us an e-mail with any medical questions that you
have at info@drmccarty.com . Sincerely,
Dr. Jim McCarty,
D.C.
Visitors to this
Site since 02-20-2002 |
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John 10:10 I have come that they might have life and |
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Dr
McCarty does not do surgery! He removes
the pressure on the brain NON-Surgically using Advanced CNS
{Central Nervous System} Restoration and Neuro Structural
Integration. Read more
about his treatments by going to the
TMJ page. THURSDAY NOVEMBER 11, 1999
WALL STREET JOURNAL High Hopes Surgery on the Skull For
Chronic Fatigue?
Doctors Are Trying It
A Bit
More Room for the Brain
By THOMAS M.
BURTON Staff Reporter of The WALL STREET JOURNAL CHICAGO — Jozan Plaza, a 45-year-old Alabama woman, visited Chicago recently to have part of the back of her skull drilled off. Was
this a good idea? Ms.
Plaza is among the roughly eight million Americans diagnosed with a condition
called fibromyalgia syndrome,
which involves widespread muscle
pain, sleeplessness, fatigue and depression. It is poorly understood
and controversial. Many doctors aren’t convinced it is a disease at all,
suspecting that in some patients it is really depression with physical
manifestations. Patients
.who are told they have fibromyalgia
— or
the closely related chronic fatigue
syndrome —
are usually just prescribed
sleeping pills, antidepressants, and physical therapy. Treating patients with these
diagnoses, in short, - isn’t brain surgery. Except that at a handful of
American hospitals, it now is. Spinal
Tap A new belief among a few
neurosurgeons is that these patients' troubles can stem from a squeezing of
the brain or spinal cord by a too-tight skull or spinal canal. For about $30,000 a case,
they are drilling and snipping away bone from the backs of people’s skulls to
""decompress” their
brains, spinal cords and central nervous systems. This is like telling the story of the
discovery of insulin,” says Ms. Plaza’s Chicago surgeon, Dan S Heffez.
“You’re talking about a completely new insight about a condition that has
baffled people since the beginning of the modern world.” He and two other
doctors, one in Baltimore and one who recently moved to North Carolina, have
operated on hundreds of such patients in all. But
other prominent doctors are aghast that such complicated and potentially dangerous
operations are being offered to patients diagnosed with conditions they regard
as primarily psychiatric in some instances. “Is this on a par with insulin?
Not on your life,” says Peter Carmel, neurosurgery chairman at New Jersey
Medical School in Newark and an authority on the skull malformations at
issue. “Would I offer a patient an operation the way they do? No.” Neurological Difficulties Surgery
proponents contend that these patients, mostly women, have been ignored or
ridiculed by much of the medical profession, and as a result often don’t get
proper neurological exams and diagnoses. These proponents say the problem
facing many such patients is a congenital skull malformation long recognized
as causing, neurological difficulties in a small number of people. It is
called “posterior fossa compression”
— or,
in-a reference to the doctor who identified it, a Chiari malformation. The
other condition that surgery proponents point to is a too-narrow spinal
canal, called “cervical spinal stenosis.” This
is what they are operating for, the surgeons say; they reject the notion that
they use surgery to treat chronic
fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia. But
Dan Clauw, a rheumatologist, at Georgetown University in Washington, contends
that only an “extremely low percentage” of chronic-fatigue and fibromyalgia
cases have such a neurological basis. He says his research group did magnetic
resonance imaging of the skull and spine in 28 fibromyalgia patients and 14
other people and found “no difference in the MRIs between the fibromyalgia
group and the control group.” At the very least, he says, a controlled
clinical trial should be done before subjecting hundreds of patients to
highly invasive surgery. The
pioneer of the surgery, Michael J. Rosner, says that he plans to publish a
-medical-journal article on the topic. “Unless you’re looking for this or you
have a high degree of suspicion, you say there is nothing wrong with the
patient,” he says. “I don’t operate on somebody who doesn’t have an abnormal exam. A
case that proved a big spur to his surgery involved a patient .who was himself
a doctor. Sam Banner, a family practitioner with a storefront office in
Dothan, Ala., was diagnosed with chronic
fatigue syndrome in 1989. He found himself so weak and tired he could no longer practice medicine, so
he took a desk job reviewing workers’ compensation claims for a local
manufacturer. In that job, he noticed that lots of spine and skull surgery
was being done by Dr. Rosner at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. The purpose was to alleviate
pressure on the lower part of the hind-brain, known as cerebellar tonsils. It is well established that
these organs can be packed too tightly and that, in rare cases, this causes
neurological problems: patients may have severe pain or numbness in the
arms, severe difficulty concentrating, or wildly exaggerated reflexes and a
wobbly gait. Dr.
Rosner, a prominent surgeon who had already helped transform accepted
treatment of head trauma, began doing skull surgery on patients who didn’t
meet classic definitions. For instance, he concluded that the cerebellar tonsils didn’t need to be
forced several millimeters below the base of the skull to cause trouble, but
could do so just by squeezing against the spinal cord. Dr.
Banner implored Dr. Rosner to do an MRI on him. Dr. Rosner did, concluding
Dr. Banner had a too-tight spine that squeezed his spinal cord. On learning there might be a physical cause for
his problem, says Dr. Banner, “I went to the chapel at the university
and got down on my hands and knees and thanked God.” Dr.
Rosner did a spinal operation called a laminectomy in 1995, and afterward,
Dr. Banner, feeling very much
better, became. something of a crusader. He named his office the
Nathanael Medical Center— “Nathanael” translates loosely from Hebrew as “gift from God”—made fibromyalgia
and chronic-fatigue a part of his practice, and organized a support group
for sufferers. He took out newspaper and Internet ads telling sufferers there might be hope for their hitherto
intractable conditions. Many
people who came to him had been seen many times by rheumatologists, neurologists,
radiologists and assorted other -ologists. “If you go into a doctor’s office and
tell them you’re tired or you hurt
all over, they don’t want to hear about it,” Dr. Banner says. When
such people were examined, he says, 50%
to 80% turned out to have cranial
or spinal malformations. He
began referring them to Dr. Rosner, who says he operated on about 90 of about
300 patients sent. Insurance generally covered the surgery because Dr.
Rosner didn’t diagnose their problems as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue
syndrome; he regarded them as having Chiari malformations or cervical spinal
stenosis. Several
of Dr. Rosner’s patients say they were disabled and miserable beforehand;
even unable to walk, and dramatically improved afterward. Stephanie B. Ash.
who had been diagnosed with chronic
fatigue syndrome, says she saw Dr. Banner on a local TV show and got
far better after surgery. “The Lord
led me to watch television that morning,” says the Dothan resident. Not
everybody was so thrilled. Four patients sued Drs. Banner and Rosner and the
University of Alabama at Birmingham health-services foundation, claiming unnecessary
surgery was done on them at UAB. Some asserted, in Houston County, Ala.,
Circuit Court, that their symptoms had worsened. One said she developed
meningitis. Doctors
complained, too. Other doctors in Dothan who saw some of these same patients
before and after surgery concluded that some operations were unnecessary and
unhelpful. Cases One
such doctor is D. Bruce Woodham, a neurosurgeon who saw a patient, Donna
McCord, in 1996 after surgery by Dr. Rosner. Dr. Woodham wrote to Dr. Rosner
that Ms. McCord was doing poorly. “I
would consider her a failure in her series as she has exactly the same
symptomology she had prior to her
surgery and now she is on disability,” he wrote. “The patient states that her
life is a wreck... she states that she is really not any better off.” Lawsuits
by Ms. McCord and two other patients against UAB and Dr. Rosner have been
settled; Dr. Banner won summary judgement in the three patients’ suits
against him. The fourth suit was withdrawn. Three
years ago, Dr. Woodham wrote a letter, signed by 13 other Dothan doctors, to
UAB’s neurosurgery chairman expressing concern about an “inordinately high”
number of operations for hind-brain
compression. The doctors said that they had seen many of the
patients Dr. Banner referred to Dr. Rosner for surgery-and that their exam
results were normal. “These patients are desperate people, eager to obtain
any sort of relief that might be offered them,” Dr. Woodham’s letter said.
“They, I feel, are easy prey to someone who offers them a quick fix for a
problem that does not have a quick fix.” UAB’s
neurosurgery chairman, Richard Morawetz, confronted Dr. Rosner and. tried to
get him to leave the faculty, contending - he was doing unnecessary
surgery, according to people familiar ‘with the events. They add that Dr. Rosner
asked for an internal medical panel to investigate, and that a panel member
asked him how much money it would take for him to leave the university. A
settlement was reached, and Dr. Rosner left UAB.. Clearly,
however, sentiment at UAB against the surgery wasn’t unanimous. Some former
colleagues of Dr. Rosner at UAB published an abstract of work that, Dr.
Rosner claims, sought credit for what were his ideas and work. That abstract
concluded that a Chiari
malformation—a too-tight skull—could contribute to fibromyalgia symptoms.
Dr. Rosner describes the events at UAB as “thieving, lying, backstabbing and
power plays.” UAB says a peer-review panel found there was no misconduct on
the part of any of the researchers. Some
doctors now face litigation from Dr. Banner. He has alleged defamation by Dr.
Woodham and the co-signers of his letter, and he has accused Dr. Morawetz
and two UAB colleagues of hurting his medical practice by criticizing his
diagnoses. A UAB spokesman declines to comment, but a lawyer for the
defendants says they deny all the suit’s allegations. It is pending in
Jefferson County, Ala., Circuit Court. Dr.
Rosner now does surgery at Park Ridge Hospital in Fletcher, N.C. Dr. Banner
still refers patients to him, and also sends some, such as Ms. Plaza, to Dr.
Heffez, who is at the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery & Neuroresearch. And
Dr. Rosner has won, a few other converts in the medical world. A
rheumatologist at the University of Wisconsin, Daniel Malone, was persuaded
by a talk Dr. Rosner gave at a medical conference and has begun referring
patients to Dr. Heffez in Chicago. A doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore, Peter C. Rowe, also heard Dr. Rosner speak and has since
sent_patients to him, to Dr. Heffez and to the third doctor who does this
kind of surgery, John D. Weingart at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Weingart and Dr.
Heffez have done about 75 of these surgeries, and Dr. Rosner an estimated
250. All
of which greatly concerns many others in medicine. Contending that this
group of patients could be one particularly susceptible to a placebo effect,
the critics complain that the surgery is being done without a rigorous effort
to compare surgery patients’ outcomes with others’. “My feeling is that
Rosner and Heffez are moving way too rapidly,” says Georgetown’s Dr. Clauw.
Though he agrees that some fibromyalgia and chronic-fatigue patients
probably have brain or spine compressions,
“my view is that it’s an extremely low percentage.” The
government doesn’t require clinical trials for new surgical techniques, but
many hospitals have internal review boards to scrutinize them. Dr. Heffez
sees no reason for any hospital to do an internal review of such surgery
because, he says, it Is “standard treatment for a standard neurological
problem that has gone undiagnosed.” Dr. Heffez plans to publish his results,
which he says have included improvement by 100% of the patients who suffered
from disorientation, dizziness or
diffuse pain, and by 95% of those with insomnia. Word
already is getting around. The National Fibromyalgia Research Association’s
Web site has publicized the technique, and word is spreading from people who
have had the surgery and are happy with it. Ms.
Plaza, for one, feels hers was a terrific idea. Before the four-hour operation,
she says, she had headaches,
blurred vision and fatigue “so powerful I had to lean against the wall.”
Now, she says, many of these symptoms have abated so much that “I feel like I
could conquer the world.” ALTERNATIVES
TO SURGERY Neuro Cranial Reconstruction Magnesium Citrate Apple Cider Vinegar Cayenne Pepper
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