Dr. Davidson

I fear I've over-hyped this entry. But maybe the history will help you understand the mystique.

Eric and I went to visit a friend we know from the New York swing dancing scene. He is a former physical therapist who got sick of running an office and dealing with insurance companies and sold his successful business at a young age. At some point in this journey, I’m not sure whether it was before or after leaving his business, he met Dr. Davidson, an osteopath and homeopath.

Dr. Davidson is a master in his field. People travel from all over the world to be treated by him. He has cured diseases and problems that traditional medicine either say cannot be cured or must be cured with surgery or chemo or other drastic measures. He does this primarily with osteopathic manipulation, which is different from chiropractic manipulation, or perhaps I should say subtler than chiropractic manipulation.

Our friend took some classes from Dr. Davidson, watched him treat scoliosis and cure things that he had been spending months and years treating in his physical therapy practice and he was reborn. He decided to devote his work to learning directly from Dr. Davidson and he began doing manipulation work instead of physical therapy.

Our friend has been learning from him for at least six or seven years now, probably longer, but I’m not sure so I’ll go with the conservative estimate. Eric and I have both been treated by our friend, and for a long time everyone in New York just thought he was crazy and had bought some New Age-y medicine system. People thought this, because the treatment feels so bizarre. The doctor touches you, finds “strains or shocks” in the body, and then touch you in barely perceptible ways and that’s it. Sometimes, I feel a drastic shift in my body after a treatment. Sometimes I don’t feel a drastic change. Which contributes to the feeling of “what did they just do?” But I was always a believer in osteopathic treatments, because our friend did a lot to treat my scoliosis.

So we went out to Phoenix, and of course, we had to see Dr. Davidson, because we’d heard so much. Plus, I’d talked to our friend about the polyps, and he recommended I see Dr. Davidson, because he didn’t have enough knowledge to treat it, but he had seen Dr. D treat other women with similar problems. I sat down in Dr. Davidson’s office and told him about myself—some medical history, what kind of things I’m sensitive to (like sugar and caffeine), etc. He took notes and then he examined me. The week before seeing him, I had started to develop what felt like a UTI, but in fact wasn’t. (I had been to the doctors and been tested.) This has happened to me a couple of times before. He felt my pelvis and said it was twisted and torqued from the surgery. He manipulated it—which as I said, is subtle and a little strange—and I instantly was standing differently. The problems I had been experiencing went away that weekend. He then treated all kinds of different things, most of which I really don’t know or understand. But he checks you all over, diagnosing when something is out of alignment and then fixes it.

The most interesting part of the treatment was when he worked on my head. He said that the brain wasn’t moving within the membrane properly. I guess the membrane around the brain keeps it moving, and in my case, something was stuck, and the brain was working to keep itself moving. Dr. Davidson said to my friend—who watched the treatment as a learning tool—that this would result in a lack of vitality. He also said it was putting strain on the pituitary gland.

Now the fascinating thing about this diagnosis is that for the last two years, I have had a lot of blood work done by my OB-GYN, and the only thing that tested problematic is one hormone that is produced and regulated by the pituitary gland. (I hadn’t told any of this to Dr. Davidson, because I hadn’t thought of it when we were talking.) Last year my doctor made me get an MRI, because typically this hormone is out of balance when there’s a tumor on the pituitary gland. The MRI came back normal, and that was the end of it. My OB-GYN thought that if I had trouble getting pregnant, she would send me to an endocrinologist and do further tests.

So Dr. Davidson manipulated my skull and the membrane (don’t ask me how, I have no idea how it works, but I could feel the pressure in my head change) and he gave me a homeopathic treatment that helped with a strain in my sternum that pulls my head into a funny position. And he said to get in touch with him in a month after finishing the homeopathic treatment. This all took about 30-40 minutes.

Now, who knows what this all means. I’m going to have to get my blood tested to see if there’s a change in the hormone levels. And since I went into his office without some disease, the changes are subtle. Though, there are some remarkable improvements.
1. I often get locked up in my diaphragm and breathing will become a struggle. When this happens I yawn a lot and feel worn out from the struggle to breathe. I was feeling like this before the treatment, and after the treatment I was breathing easy and the color returned to my cheeks. In fact, for the whole weekend, I was amazed at the color in my face and the shine in my eyes.
2. As I said, I was experiencing irritation in my pelvis and all the functions associated with that and that has gone away.

But no doubt about it, it’s a bizarre treatment. I can see why modern medicine feels like there’s no way it can work. But after listening to my friends’ stories and seeing a true master like Dr. Davidson work, I have to say I’m a believer.

So that’s my story of treatment. I feel like I want to share other stories, such as the history of osteopathic medicine (at least the little I heard from my friend), other amazing treatment stories, stories about what a funny man Dr. Davidson is, and thoughts on how this experience makes me think about health insurance. I do feel like this is going on forever.

One reflection, since we’re talking about health insurance, Dr. Davidson will not take any insurance. We can submit his bill to our insurance policy, because we have an out-of-network plan, but he wants nothing to do with it. And if we get a national health plan, he’ll find a way to work outside of it. He had an article in his office written by a doctor talking about why he (the author of the article) didn’t accept insurance. It said that the doctor felt he had to compromise his care for patients to meet the requirements of the insurance policy. Some patients came in asking for every test in the book because it was basically free for them, and this meant he had less time and then later, less insurance quotas, to treat the truly sick. Therefore, to meet the insurance quotas, he was trying to discourage patients from getting tests, and he felt guilty about the games he had to play to keep his office running. He felt that ultimately he saw that dead patients meant the most savings to the insurance companies, and this made him feel a tension to care for his patients to the best of his ability and to not upset the insurance companies and have them stop working with his office. I think this tension is the reason many doctors want nothing to do with insurance. In fact, since I’ve gotten on Eric’s super insurance plan, I’ve been to the best doctors I’ve ever seen, and none of them take insurance or co-pays.

The other interesting thing to think about is how much cheaper Dr. Davidson is than much of the medical profession. He has very high rates, and in some ways, it could look more expensive. Eric and I paid a lot for this one visit. But then, what is a lot? (I don’t really want to quote numbers here, but I’m happy to share in a more private forum.) When I got that blood work done, and my doctor wanted me to get an MRI, that was at least ten times as expensive as this treatment from Dr. Davidson. And he was able to diagnose a problem with my pituitary gland that was subtler than the MRI machine could detect. And I’m going out on a limb of faith that many skeptics would laugh at, but I have to wonder if the manipulation treatment didn’t ultimate treat a problem that could have led to a tumor after many years.

And in terms of cost, well, Dr. Davidson treats patients with cancer. I’m sure his treatments end up being far less than chemo and radiation. So it’s interesting how cost is calculated. My friend told a story about a man he cured of a lymphatic cancer. The man had been too sick to be treated with chemo or surgery, so the hospital had sent him home to die. My friend talked to him and learned that six months earlier he had been knocked unconscious by a falling box at work, and since the accident his health had deteriorated until he was now dying of cancer. My friend treated the shock from the accident and got his body back to functioning after a week of regular treatments. He began improving and went back to his doctor cured of cancer within the month.

The osteopathic philosophy is that if the body is in proper alignment, able to move properly, then the body achieves health on its own. Many things can inhibit proper alignment: a poor constitution (bad genes), an accident or severe shock to the system, emotions, environment, etc. But they diagnose everything by feeling where the body is out of alignment and putting it back into alignment.

Dr. Davidson’s criticism of mainstream medical practice is that they spend too much time treating symptoms and don’t get to the root of the problem.

I’m really attracted to the underlying philosophies of osteopathic medicine. I don’t think it’s the only medical answer, but I wish so very much that more osteopaths were trained and working as an alternative. My friend explained that when the pharmaceutical industry became so big after WWII, osteopaths were pushed out of medicine by the AA. Some of the colleges managed to convince the government that they deserved funding, because they worked in rural areas and they were general family doctors, and those were harder and hard to find. But when Dr. Davidson was starting his career in the seventies, he spent one week of every month traveling to learn from the best in the field—older doctors that all died in the eighties and nineties. Now, it’s very, very hard to find an osteopath who’s any good. Or at least I say this based on my friend’s experience with the doctors he’s met. Many doctors are in training now, but this branch of medicine is sort of the bastard child of medicine.

But I wish I could be regularly treated by either my friend or Dr. Davidson. There’s something to this. I feel a little sheepish about my convictions, but the convictions are strong nonetheless. I really appreciate this view of the body and disease and health. And even though I trusted my OB-GYN to do surgery on me, I am fundamentally unhappy with the way she cared for my body. I think she did an excellent job by medical standards. I think the surgery was amazingly smooth and that she gave me top-notch care in the style she was trained. But her training has no idea what caused the problem in the first place and she doesn’t even care. If surgery can take away “the problem” of polyps, that’s good enough for her. It’s not good enough for me. And I think there are other ways.