I first came in contact with Dr. Brown’s treatment several years ago through the family of a young arthritis patient here in Iowa named Don Knop. Don’s folks were in the cattle business, and they heard about Dr. Brown from a woman they knew from somewhere down south who had been successfully treated by him. The family was weighing whether to send Don to the National Hospital in Washington, and they asked for my opinion.
I had to admit I knew nothing about Dr. Brown, so they gave me some tapes and articles about his approach. Everything I heard and read about the infectious nature of arthritis made good sense to me and was consistent with the things I had observed or suspected about the disease in the course of my own practice. So I did some checking in the Washington area, and learned that Dr. Brown was very highly regarded, and I recommended to the family that they send Don out to see him.
Don got better. A lot of people around here heard about it, and they asked me to send them to Washington for the same treatment. When they went, they got better, too. In a little while, it seemed that everybody in northwest Iowa and the whole Midwest was calling me up and asking me to refer them to the National Hospital. I couldn’t send people I didn’t know, so the Knop family asked why I didn’t invite Dr. Brown out here to talk to area doctors and tell them how they could do the same thing themselves.
He came out in the summer of 1979, which was when I met him for the first time. He told me I should use his method in my own practice. When I asked him out, I had no intention of getting into that kind of treatment myself and I didn’t know if I wanted to; I wasn’t sure if I could or should. But he convinced me to try it. After I proved that it could work on the patients I already had who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, I quickly found that I couldn’t deny it to the other patients who started coming to me because they had heard about my results. My practice in arthritis suddenly mushroomed.
Dr. Brown’s technique has been far more successful than anything I had done previously to help patients with rheumatoid arthritis and the results are better than any I have heard about elsewhere. I am satisfied that in the course of using his method I have not caused any of my patients harm, which is one of the first things that doctors who treat patients for arthritis have to think about.
I haven’t done any research on my results, but I would estimate that up to about 85 percent of the patients I have treated this way have improved substantially. The remaining 15 percent represent patients whose disease was so far advanced, so aggressive, or so stubborn that I was not able to get the results I would have liked. I have always wished I lived closer to Dr. Brown so I could see how he would have handled these cases, but of course that’s why I’m treating arthritics in the first place—because we live so far from the Arthritis Institute that the patients just can’t get there.
As another guess, I would conservatively estimate that I have treated around two hundred patients with Dr. Brown’s technique. The tradition of rheumatoid arthritis is that it’s a discouraging disease and that patients don’t get over it. I practice in a part of the country where people have to travel long distances, sometimes thirty miles, just to see their family doctor. There isn’t any easy way to have follow-up under those circumstances, and patients don’t drive that kind of distance without a good reason. I’m always amazed, even today, when I run into patients who I haven’t seen in a few years and I ask them how they’re doing and they say they’re just fine, that the disease hasn’t given them a bit of trouble in all the time since I last saw them. If I were using any other approach, I’d be pretty sure that the reason I hadn’t seen them was that the treatment had failed, and not that it was such a success.
Quite a few people come to me because they have heard I’m getting good results with arthritis, and whenever someone like that walks in I make it a point to tell them I’m not an arthritis specialist, that I’m a general practitioner. The reason I do this is to let them know this isn’t a dangerous technique that only a few doctors can handle, but that it’s something any family practitioner can do. I tell them that if they have something requiring a specialist they should see one, but there are times when a specialist isn’t necessary and this is one of them—it’s so safe, even a country doctor like myself can do it.
I wish I could say that I haven’t had any bad results using this approach, but that isn’t the truth. My bad results—the only bad results—have been that Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Medicare refuse to give any recognition to this form of treatment. That’s why I’ve lost contact with a lot of these patients; they can’t afford to come back because the payment for follow-up comes right out of their pocket, and if there’s nothing wrong they don’t want to pay to have me to verify that they’re well.
All the patients I’ve treated for rheumatoid arthritis have paid out of their own pockets, but there have been a lot more who turned away because they couldn’t afford it, especially if it meant going into the hospital for intravenous therapy. The ones that don’t have the money have been forced to find a doctor who would treat their disease with the standard arthritis medicines—treatments that cost much more, are highly dangerous, and will eventually fail—because that’s the only way they can get anything under their insurance policies. And that really bothers me.
At first, Medicare wouldn’t pay for the treatment because they said the approach was experimental. I’ve got all the paperwork showing the results with my own patients, and I’ve shown them all of Dr. Brown’s results as well, including published research. So then they switched over to saying it’s just investigational, because it’s only done in a few widely scattered places around the country and hasn’t been accepted nationwide as the standard treatment. It’s Catch-22.
There’s nothing worse than getting hopeful telephone calls from people on Medicare who are willing to drive several hundred miles to my office so I can give them some help with the pain and suffering of their rheumatoid arthritis—and having to tell them not to come because they can’t afford the cost of the hospital. I won’t start treatment unless I know I can get them on intravenous therapy if they need it, and most of the really bad cases do need it. It’s a situation that just has got to change.
On the other side of the coin, a lot of the people who do start treatment with me are early enough in their disease that they can get good results fast. These are frequently people who have been diagnosed by other doctors and are smart enough to read up on the standard treatments before they begin; they discover that gold can be lethal and that other standard treatments can cause blindness or death, so they call me instead. Those are the people I treat and then might not see again for a couple of years until they drop by and tell me how well they are, that the arthritis is all gone. Those are the ones that make me feel good.
I suppose that if I had never met Dr. Brown, the number of arthritics I would treat in the normal course of my practice would only be about 5 percent of the number I see now. But even today the number of my arthritic patients would be a lot higher if I didn’t have to turn so many away—people who are old and who Medicare won’t pay for, people who are so sick they can’t get here on their own, all looking for a little hope that I can’t give them.
Eventually, this will change; in fact, I have seen some interesting changes already. In the time since I started using Dr. Brown’s treatment, the attitude of my peers, including area rheumatologists and orthopedists, toward his infectious theory and the use of antibiotic therapy has shifted noticeably. The jokes and the snide comments have tapered off or come to an end. Other doctors read the same literature I do, and it’s becoming pretty clear that the other avenues of treatment are coming to a dead end. As that happens, acceptance of the theory of an infectious source gets greater every day.
As good as it is, I’m sure that what I’m doing today is not the final answer. Dr. Brown has done almost all the work to get us to this point, and I’m certain he agrees with me that out of that groundwork there has to be an even better way to deal with this disease, one that will put it away for good for everyone. And I think he has brought us within reach of that happening.