Notes on A Talk by an Osteopath

Posted on February 21, 2006 in Lectures Mania Psycho-bunk

Almost no one likes the meds. The hackle of taking them on schedule or the side effects which are sometimes troubling and sometimes trivial unsettles the sick more than the disease itself. (I know a fellow who found an excuse for not taking every medication out there. “It leaves a metallic taste in my mouth.” “I tried it for three days and it just wasn’t working.” “I got a headache on Tuesday, so I stopped taking it.”) So it didn’t surprise me when several noncompliants showed up for a local DBSA talk on holistic medicine. They were looking for easy ways to get out of taking the meds. To the speaker’s credit, he said that there were no easy ways.

Just notes adapted from some made on a yellow legal pad:

• What bothers me most throughout this lecture is not his technique but the misrepresentations that he makes about allopathic medicine. Claims that he very rarely gives out meds. We discover that about “twenty to thirty percent” of his patients use psychotropics.
• The first thing he does is do a name-drop of some television star. Patient? Bad boy. Then he showed us a pile of journals that he’d collected over the years, but did not give us any facts. He talks about not being rich, but he’s wearing several turquoise and silver rings. So he’s a conspicuous consumer.
• Osteopathy, I think, implies intelligent design. “Trust that the body has an innate healing system that will always work.” Tell that to an AIDs patient. Tell that to my back.
• He loves Judith Orloff and is astounded by her intuition. Described a process that sounded like “cold reading“, a trick often used by faux psychics and stage mentalists.
• Characterizes allopathic medicine as being founded on pill-popping — the pill solves everything. “Thank God for my patients I don’t believe that.” Do you want a little grandiosity with your yoga? Believes that you can implant the belief that the patient won’t be bipolar anymore. Yeah, I’ve met one of your patients and whatever he tells himself, he’s still recognizably manic or depressed. (And the fellow is at the talk, shaking in excitement.)He’s hardly a master of managing his emotions — life is a big free-for-all for him.
• An episode, the D.O. tells us, is only the old ways breaking down so a new one can be born. He does use psychiatric meds during the breakdown. So he’s not prone to utter folly. Can’t really buy his claim that you’re completely healed at the other end.
• Are those who have suffered the best healers? I might have been a shaman in other times. When I ask him, later, about his misrepresentations of contemporary psychiatric medicine, he asks me if I’ve ever had a vision. “Not since I’ve been on lithium,” I smile.
• “I haven’t treated everybody,” he says. So the world is bereft of his teaching. Grandiosity again?
• He tells us “watch the self-talk that says I’m messed up, I’m messed up.” This I buy. I put a box around this quote. My allopathic psychiatrist and my therapist would strongly agree with this.
• Represents the view that mind and body can be separated. So brain damage should have no effect on the brain? He may be getting at something, but he’s using the wrong language.
• How does bipolar disorder come into being? he asks. Doesn’t like the gene model. Fixes it by “laying down new neuron fibers”.
• Shows us a picture — one of those classic “energy diagrams” that show chakra points, ley lines in the body, etc. “This is what I see when a patient comes into my office.” The bipolars titter. Yeah, we see that kind of stuff, too, when we’re in mania.
• “You bipolars have no system for managing your emotions.” Is he suggesting that our disease is a character defect or deficiency? I ask him. Oh no no no.
• Goes on and on about his cognitive therapy. Neglects to say that the best combination is cognitive therapy and medications. Most psychiatrists will agree with this. Doesn’t mention that cognitive therapy alone has a low success rate, too. When challenged, he mutters about not having his cognitive therapy style examined.
• By claiming the existence of energy centers, I write, we can put out an untestable hypothesis and say whatever we want to say is true.
• I keep wondering just what his behind-the-scenes personality is like. Does he pop pills in secret?
• Argument by word association?: ” I need to get out into the garden because I need to be grounded.”
• He shows us a slide of a fellow who had cancer and severe depression. Went to a clinic of unnamed orientation. Fellow is on the plump side, but not obese as far as I can tell. Then he shows us a second side to demonstrate “the miracle” after yoga: man has well built upper body, ability to bend over backwards and touch the ground with his hands, and a waist that looks like it has been severely corsetted. The waist makes me wonder if this man isn’t anorexic.
• When I announce that I am on lithium, a former nurse tells me that what I am really looking for is the right kind of food — laden with lithium — that will satisfy a deficiency. I ask her if she takes food supplements. She does. Lithium is my food supplement I reply. Doc backs up my lithium use.

Afterwards, a few of us meet. He’s got some good observations, we agree, but he doesn’t understand the severity of bipolar disorder and our helplessness, how it took courage for us to walk through that psychiatrist’s door and say “I am sick”. He’s capitalizing on the occasionally rampant fear of the meds. Maybe this will help. Maybe this will help.

When I get home, I tell Lynn about his claim that he has enabled patients to go off bipolar meds. She says that might be true for cyclothymics, but severe sufferers are a different story. Yes, I went through years of talk therapy before I gave in and tried the meds.

I might look forward to a day when less lithium helps me. And that will be because, in part, I have done work like the D.O. suggests — yoga, meditation, cognitive reframing. In fact, the way I see the meds is that they are not The Cure. There is no cure. But the meds lay down a floor upon which I can practice my backflips.