I ended my last Healthy.net column by telling you that my life’s mission since my husband Tim’s death in 2005 has been to educate the public about treatments that are effective and innovative, but that most conventional doctors don’t know about yet. Even worse, when doctors find out about these treatments from their patients, they often refuse to prescribe them because—in their own words—these treatments “are not the standard of care.”
Despite doctors' refusal or ignorance, people are discovering these treatments on their own, thanks to the Internet, and to all the patient advocates who are spreading the word through their websites, blogs and books.
In my book, HONEST MEDICINE, I feature four such treatments that have been effectively treating (and, in some cases, curing) such serious illnesses and conditions as multiple sclerosis, lupus, Crohn’s disease, pediatric epilepsy, liver disease, some cancers and non-healing wounds for many years. And even before the publication of my book, I was writing about treatments like these on my award-winning blog.
The treatment that started me on this quest is Silverlon, a simple mesh cloth impregnated with silver ions. Silverlon literally saved Tim’s life in 2002, when his doctors’ treatments—repeated surgeries—were only making his condition (a non-healing head wound following brain tumor surgery) worse. This experience dramatically changed my understanding of how doctors treat patients, and what we can do to help ourselves get the treatments we need—treatments that can improve and even save lives.
To summarize this paradigm-shifting experience: In 2001, Tim walked into the hospital for a brain tumor surgery in relatively good condition. He sailed through the surgery itself, only to experience skin that wouldn't heal along the suture line.
For eight months, doctors performed yet more surgeries—eight in all—whose sole purpose was to find two pieces of skin that would hold together. They even performed one surgery where they took pieces of skin—grafts—from other parts of his body. None of these surgeries worked. In fact, they only made him worse, until finally, he was severely brain injured and paralyzed from the surgical assaults on his body.
Desperately in search of solutions, through a doctor friend I found Silverlon, and it worked literally overnight.
Yet, to my surprise (shock, really), although Tim's doctors witnessed this miracle firsthand, not one of them showed the slightest interest in learning about this treatment—a treatment which is FDA-approved for ALL non-healing wounds.
To make matters worse, Tim’s doctors all warned me that our success might have been a fluke. In any case, they were quite sure it was “anecdotal.” Of course, I knew it was neither a fluke, nor anecdotal. I'd seen the benefits of Silverlon firsthand. And so had they.
Upset that Tim’s doctors weren’t at all interested in learning about Silverlon, I reached out to the National Brain Tumor Foundation, and wrote an article for their newsletter, SEARCH (http://honestmedicine.typepad.com/National-Brain-Tumor-Foundation-Article.pdf). Naïvely, I hoped that other doctors would read my article and become excited about Silverlon—and that our success would be repeated many times over in the years to come for other brain tumor patients with non-healing wounds. It didn’t happen then. And it still hasn’t happened. I hope that my book and my articles (like this one) will provide the necessary impetus for people to learn about Silverlon and the other treatments I write about.