A story from my practice, and why I love what I do :-)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It's rare to get the kind of specificity of the feedback letter I received just this morning. I could have shortened it a lot, as I value your time. But the details seem so important that I just couldn't do it. In short, because of intuition (a mother's and mine), an eleven year old girl, whose parents had been told by Sloan Kettering Cancer Center that she would likely die of cancer without chemo and the removal of large samples of bone, tissue, and cartilage from her sternum is now solving her problem with Traumeel anti-inflammatory ointment and Arnica by mouth.
Here is the letter I received (used with permission):
We're so grateful to have found you. My 11 year old daughter had a bony bump on her chest that turned out to be her sternum that had risen up from the chest wall. We were advised to take her xrays to Sloan Kettering cancer hospital which I was loath to do. They stated right away that they suspected cancer and wanted to insert a chemotherapy tube directly into her chest. After a meeting with another doctor there he prescribed a biopsy with CT scans. They detected a tumor and wanted to do invasive diagnostic surgery that would have taken large samples of bone, tissue and cartilage from our 11 yr. old's sternum. They recommended a prosthetic breastplate could be put in place and bone fillers injected. All of this was overwhelming but they were very firm in their opinion that this was probably a cancer that left untreated would kill our child. They kept repeating that although they understood the need for my husband and I to discuss this we only had days not weeks. They pressed hard for us to schedule surgery right away. All of my instincts went against this. After all, my daughter had fallen off a ladder and been hit in the sternum at camp. Out of desperation to stave off what I felt would be devastating to our family I called you. You said that if you hadn't read the urgency in my email you wouldn't have been able to tell by your scan/reading that anything was seriously wrong. You said she was in great health ( all of her blood work and tests turned out to be perfect) and that what her sternum had was swelling from trauma that needed to go down and that it was already healing. Wow-that sounded simple enough. You recommended Traumeel anti-inflammatory and arnica by mouth twice a day for a short time. I put it on every night for a week and at the end of the week the swelling had gone down by 50%. When I took her CT scans to two orthopedic surgeons they both noticed a crack in her sternum that was healing and doing fine. The top doctors who are department chairs at Sloan Kettering hadn't seen it or if they did never mentioned this. I sent all of her reports from Sloan Kettering to another major hospital for a second opinion. Their findings: no tumor, no cancer, no anything but a very easy to see fracture in the sternum that was healing and had some healing tissue around it and some swelling. They recommended anti-inflammatory creams or pills. Sound familiar? Your diagnosis corresponded with what my gut was telling me and you didn't even know about the blood work being great nor had you the benefit of all the imaging or a number of other details that I left out. I'm so grateful to have found you because your words guided me through traumatic feelings and despair and set me on a path of simple action. Thank you so much for your work and guidance and I hope others with medical vagaries will trust in this method.
| 
