I am asked this question all the time by clients, prospects, friends, and peers in my field. Figured it was time I made it an article.
It was the summer of 1989, I was 15 and working as a gas station attendant. I had worked since the age of eleven at some sort of part time job. I liked having hard earned cash in my pocket and enjoyed being able to buy things I wanted with my own money.
It was around late July and I began feeling rotten all the time. Fatigued, nauseous, and generally depressed.Some days, I was having a hard time getting out of bed, and I was constantly vomiting at work for no reason. Considering my diet, cigarettes and the amount of booze I was enjoying during those teenage summer months, I didn’t think much of it. I figured it might also be the layers upon layers of benzene and oil that were on my hands all day every day.
Since a new school year and soccer season were upon us, I figured I would just suck it up another few weeks and then I would probably get better when the cigarette smoking, booze and job all stopped for soccer season.
Two weeks later I woke up in the morning, unable to lift either of my elbows above my shoulders. It was the weirdest thing I had ever felt in my life. Nothing I could do could bring my arms above my shoulders. I couldn’t imagine how I had hurt them or what I might have done. I thought maybe I had just slept in a weird position. Within days my knees started clicking and one had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe for no reason. My mom decided to take me to the family doctor and an orthopedic.
This general practitioner had been seeing me since I was 5. He was an older man in his late seventies. He would have a lit Pall Mall hanging from his mouth as he examined me. Without any blood work, urine samples, any diagnostics outside of BP, body temp and heart rate, he looked at me with that old school medical intuition and told me I had some sort of mild arthritis.
I looked at him and thought, those Pall Malls he was smoking finally took hold of his brain. I bounced around doctors who had theories ranging from gout, to rheumatic fever, Lyme disease, and finally it was discovered that I suffered from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. It was a form of the disease that my mother had dealt with since she was 20. My first reaction was WTF is juvenile rheumatoid arthritis? And how do you get rid of it?
Unfortunately in the late 80s very little was known about the disease within allopathic circles. Chinese medicine and alternative medicine had therapies already in place. Unfortunately, in 1987 there was no internet and researching things took hours, weeks, and months. Resource availability was very limited.
Things began to take a turn for the worse rapidly. By early October, I was barely able to walk and by the time Halloween rolled around I was barely able to get out of bed. My mother would have to come into my room at night and roll me over because I was too stiff or weak to push the covers around.
By Thanksgiving I was a living corpse most of the time. I was completely conscious, in horrific pain, unable to fully move or move at all sometimes. The most tragic of the symptoms, in irony, was that some days I would wake up feeling completely fine. No pain, no clicking, no swelling. It was if the disease had disappeared. I would think the last few months or days since my last remission was some sort of bad dream. But either in a few days or most times by nightfall, the pain would set in and I would sadly realize the hell I was living was no dream. This taunting and erratically of the disease was the cruelest part. It would give me glimmers of hope and show me what my life used to be like. Only to take it back from me each time.
Neither my doctors nor my parents or any of the books I was reading had any answers for me. I never heard of naturopathy, knew little about acupuncture, knew zilch about nutrition. As a matter of fact, my diet back then though Middle Eastern was supplemented by a swath of American processed foods and sugar. Packaged goods were a staple in my household.
My parents couldn’t afford to take me to a specialist or in their opinion I didn’t need one. I only went to my family practitioner who would plead with them to go to a specialist because this was out of his league. In hindsight, it was probably best they never sought one out. Instead, my family doctor would prescribe 15 aspirins per day for me to take. That did nothing. As a matter of fact, they probably added to the fire that was my degraded gut. I would limp the hall ways of my high school, popping pills and grinding my teeth from the pain, trying to just look normal.
I barely made it out of high school. If it wasn’t for the compassion of my teachers, the fact that I was moderately intelligent and that I put in some serious work, I would have never graduated. The next two years of my life saw the same patterns of severe affliction to subsided remission. I always had a heavy limp, couldn’t do what I wanted all the time and worst of all felt very vulnerable. For those next two years after graduation during my early college years, I would self medicate using alcohol, pot, cocaine, and pills.
Sometimes you get what you need
In 1993, a Long Island house wife too absorbed in her coffee barreled out of a side street and T- boned my car sending me into oncoming traffic. Miraculously, I avoided all the cars coming at me. Myself and my passenger avoided certain death since neither of us had our seat belts on.
After being released from the hospital with only some bruising and a tweaked back, I was put in contact with a local chiropractor. He took notice of my rheumatoid arthritis listed on my paperwork and asked me how I knew I had the disease. By this time I was decently knowledgeable about the disease. Well, at least I thought I was.
After speaking with him I realized I actually knew less than I thought. He began asking me about all my lifestyle habits, eating, exercising, and supplements. I was confused since he was a chiropractor, what did he know about nutrition? Turned out he did nutritional consulting as well. He lectured me on a wide range of nutritional topics. Told me to avoid soda, sugar, processed foods, wheat, nightshades and cheese. Nightshades? He suggested I try looking for the foods that might be aggravating my condition , through trial and error. And of course, told me to stop drinking and doing drugs. No cheese. No drugs? Was the pain that bad? He advised me to exercise and get a juicer. He put me on phosphate and some pharmaceutical grade vitamins. When I took them, ate right, and exercised there was marked improvement and at times long stretches of remission.
When he had first spoke to me, I stood there and stared at him. Dumb founded, that an accident would lead me to a person who had answers for me. To someone who had some knowledge of another type of medicine. Another solution. Initially I thought he was just full of shit.
So I submerged myself into learning about
holistic medicine, acupuncture, nutrition, stress, yoga, macrobiotic diets, gluten intolerance. I learned about the integration of all the body systems. I found unpublished research and other options being tested in Europe. It became a near obsession.
I have never been able to fully control or eradicate it from my body, but through practice and trying to eat right and exercise I was able to lead a substantially normal life. I worked for eight years as a bartender on my feet and have enjoyed a very active life. It’s been hard at times and the flare ups are intense, but knowing that a solution exists at least puts the ball in my court. Considering I was told I would be in a wheel chair by the age of 19, 22,24,27,30, and 33, I think I have done ok, as I reached 40 this year with no wheel chair in site.
The rheumatologists, doctors, orthopedics and every other allopathic doctor that I met along the way never had a real solution for me. More pills, research participation, rest. They really had no clue. As a matter of fact as late as 2001, I went to a rheumatologist to see if there was any sort of new advances in rheumatology. I was having a bad flare up at the time and nothing I was trying was working. It was once again the typical condescending conversation I had with many doctors before her. She being the “exalted expert” and me being the dumb, ignorant, unknowledgeable patient. Until this day I am not sure why doctors get annoyed if you have done any sort of research. She instead insisted there was no food connection to rheumatoid arthritis. That it did not originate in the gut, and that there was no food shown to improve my condition.
Her answer? Methotraxanate. Prednisone. And some other stuff I can’t remember, which was supposed to shut off my immune system. Yes that makes sense. Lucky for me the owner of the pharmacy where I worked for a few summers told me to throw out those prescriptions, stop smoking cigarettes and get into a pool. Best advice I ever got.
My current self-prescribed treatment includes slippery elm, turmeric, ginger, black strap molasses, apple cider vinegar, hyaluronic acid, vegetarian diet, yoga, milk thistle, meditation, and roller-blading with my three pit bulls.
I market alternative medical practices because I’m a believer and I’m a customer. If I never had that car accident I might have never met anyone to put me on the right track to finding answers. Or it might have been too late. The internet did not become widely available until 1995. Even then, there were no online health websites, WebMD, or a research source like Lexus-Nexus etc. No social media to reach out to different experts or friends.
It’s hard to express the amount of resentment and anger I had towards the medical community. It wasn’t until I learned that most allopathic doctors are never taught any nutrition courses or holistic style ideas or any naturopathy in medical school, that I realized it wasn’t really their fault. The system itself was broken.
This experience I had would solidify my loyalty to naturopathic medicine and alternative medicine in general. Anytime a loved one or colleague was ill, I would always suggest an alternative doctor. I would rattle off how allopathic doctors weren’t helping. That all they did was mask the symptoms. I would advise them to find someone to look at the underlying causes. I became a mouthpiece for the industry.
Never Forget
Fast forward 18 years since the car accident to mid-2011, I was laid off for the third time in five years, so I decided to take my career in a different direction. I decided to open up a digital marketing business. I had always wanted to work for myself and I was great at marketing. I wanted to market great products, services and companies that cared about the world. After 20 years of working in businesses I hated or at best couldn’t care less about, I was done selling my soul.
As a business I wanted to only target a few select markets. They had to be ones I cared about and I knew a lot about. And I wanted to only market companies that were in line with my personal value system. I wanted to focus on markets that also showed potential for strong growth. Not every business decision can be made with the heart. So future growth was important.
Trying to figure out which businesses to specialize in became a bit overwhelming until I reminded myself who I cared about. And the alternative medical community was the first to jump into my mind. It seemed like an amazing idea. Marketing the exact practitioners I had been promoting privately for years. But was there a market for it? Did alternative medical practices need someone who understood them, their business, and their patients?
Market Research happy hour style
I was living in Portland, Oregon at the end of 2011, during which time I was putting my business plan together. A close friend who was also a naturopath, and would later become my first customer, came into town for a naturopathic seminar. During one of her nights in town I met up with her and about ten of her friends for happy hour.
The group was compromised of a handful of naturopaths, acupuncturists, a neuroscientist and a psychologist. Along the night I was listening to these new and experienced doctors speak about their businesses, prospects for the future and current struggles. They talked about their businesses plans or lack of one and their marketing strategies.
I was surprised at how apprehensive or at times how lost they were when it came to those topics. Since I had considerable business experience and marketing know how I started to discuss, with just two of them, how to use current trends and strategies to reach a broader audience. As I continued to speak, I realized that all 10 of them had stopped speaking to each other and were all listening to me and asking questions.
It was then I realized that yes, there was a huge need. That there was a dramatic landscape shifting in front of us all, and the alternative medical field could definitely use someone to help them navigate the shifting digital marketing landscape.
Marketing alternative medicine isn’t about just collecting a pay check and making clients happy. It’s about being part of something bigger and more important than the small world I created for myself. It’s about making sure that people understand the value of the options available, and to know that there are alternate solutions for everything. It’s about pushing for legislation that gets these services available to more people and giving practitioners wider scope of practice. It’s about being part of an industry that is more collaborative than competitive.
