NGUOI VIET - Family finds relief in chosen field of medicine

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Family finds relief in chosen field of medicine
Thursday, February 01, 2007 Story By Josie Cabiglio Photos By Vu Dinh Trong

EASE UP: The chiropractor attends to clients, trying to concentrate and to listen carefully to their needs.

Patrick's family is his own support system. From left, they are his brother John, his two nephews -- with Nathan on his father's lap -- mom Mai and dad Thông.

John Vũ Lê shocked his family when he told them he was shunning medicine to take his 6-month-old son to a chiropractor to treat his asthma.

At the time, “I told him, John, what are you doing? He doesn’t have back pain. He hasn’t had an accident,” said Patrick Xuân Lê, John’s younger brother. But after seeing how chiropractic helped Nathan, now 7, he was sold.

So much so, in fact, that he scrapped plans to attend medical school, opting instead to study chiropractic, said Patrick Lê, 30, of the decision that transformed his life six years ago. He now heads The Center for Higher Power, opened in 2006 in the heart of Little Saigon in Westminster, Calif.

Patrick’s belief that chiropractic treatment has kept Nathan free of asthma since his infant days may sound unorthodox — and some in the medical community question whether chiropractic can eliminate this or other illness from a person’s system without medical intervention — but don’t tell that to the boy’s father.

Seeing that Nathan had difficulty breathing, John and his wife took the child to a doctor who diagnosed asthma, sending the family home with medicine, an inhaler and a breathing machine. The couple looked at that machine and “felt sorry” for their boy, his father recalled.

At the urging of his sister, Cecile Richardson, John took Nathan to see her chiropractor, Gavin Grant, D.C., who “adjusted Nathan and got on a program with him. After the first visit, we saw a change” in the tot’s breathing, John said. “We decided to stop the medicines even though Dr. Grant didn’t tell us to. We went to him three times a week, and after three months, Nathan didn’t need the breathing machine, so we donated it to his office as a testament that chiropractic care works.”

Intrigued, Patrick signed up for a few spinal adjustments of his own from Grant and, in less than two months, found himself with a new job. Grant “asked me if I wanted to work with him. He said he saw something in me that spoke chiropractic,” Patrick said.

As Grant’s assistant, Patrick performed consultations and handled front-desk work, watching people “come in and out every day. It was very cool. They no longer had the problems they were having before. No medicines anymore, and no surgery,” he said.

Patrick, a 2004 graduate of Life Chiropractic College West in Hayward, Calif., is adamant that even though folks who come to see him ask him to “cure” them of some malady, his work does not involve curing in the traditional sense of the word, he said.

“We help them, but we can’t cure.” The remedy is “all within them. They don’t even need medicines. They need to acknowledge what is wrong with their lives,” he said, adding that he refers individuals to doctors “when it’s an emergency situation.”

Rather than cures, “I see miracles happening... I see people living at their best,” Patrick said. He juggles about 350 clients, ranging from infants to adults, describing his work as teaching them “about their bodies and their life.”

He focuses on adjusting the spinal cord, removing misalign-ments of the vertebrae to eliminate pressure on the spinal nerve so it can function without interference, he said. “With the nervous system, each nerve from the spinal cord goes to a different part of the body.” With asthma, “messages from the brain that needed to get to the lungs are not working properly. I open up the main system of the body so that pathway to lungs is open,” he said, adding that he believes medication should be used “primarily for life-threatening emergency situations.”

Most individuals taking medicine “are just masking their symptoms or just covering up the warning signals (pain) our bodies are trying to give off. The medications even prevent our bodies from naturally regulating (themselves by) coughing, sneezing, fever, vomiting, diarrhea, runny nose” and so on, he said.

Because he wants to help as many adults and children as possible, Patrick, the son of immigrants from Việt Nam, charges fees using a sliding scale based on a client’s ability to pay — and he turns down no one. “Our mission is to serve as many people as possible and make it affordable for everyone,” he said. He does not take insurance plans nor work with workers compensation or accident cases.

“I want to promote that a person does not have to have a plastic (insurance) card in their wallet in order to receive adequate care or live well. That insurance card is for emergency purposes only and should be used in that manner.”

Even though the American Chiropractic Association’s statement on the care of children outlines its long-standing belief that chiropractors, in concert with other health-care providers, can play an important role in the health of youngsters, some evidence indicates that chiropractic alone might benefit children with asthma, said Angela Kargus, ACA spokeswoman.

It’s “important to note that evidence from many types of experimental studies — basic and clinical, comprised of randomized controlled trials and cohort and case studies — provides a promising basis with which to consider chiropractic management” for childhood conditions such as asthma, she said.

Anthony L. Rosner, a director at the ACA-supported Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research in Brookline, Mass., said that Patrick “does make some sense in that addressing the needs of the nervous system might reduce or eliminate the need for some medications.”

He’s worried, however, about referrals made “to medical doctors only in life-threatening situations. It shouldn’t be pushed to that limit. There should be freer collaboration” between chiropractors and the medical community, he said.

Some members of the medical community agree that chiropractic spinal adjustments have their place in treating those with medical problems, while some have concerns that such treatment alone can eliminate asthma or other illnesses.

“It is pretty much impossible to prove or disprove anecdotal stories” of people overcoming illnesses through chiropractic care alone “since it is one person’s version of their medical illness and their interpretation of cause and effect,” said Dr. Andy Nish of the American Board of Allergy and Immunology and an American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology fellow. “In fact, multiple factors could be in play,” including initial misdiagnosis of the illness, its spontaneous resolution over time, its response to other treatments and the placebo effect, he said.

He hasn’t seen literature in peer-reviewed journals demonstrating that chiropractic is an efficient treatment of asthma or other potentially life-threatening conditions, Nish said.

“It is important to keep an open mind” about chiropractic, said Dr. David Peden, professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. “Some non-traditional approaches, with the right kind of study, are going to prove very useful” while “many are going to prove to be not useful.”

As an example, he cites the medical community’s willingness to examine alternative ways of treating illnesses, the work of the National Institute of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This component of the NIH is looking at the value of using chiropractic and other non-traditional medicines to treat various diseases.

One way that chiropractic treatments may help people deal with such things as asthma is that the spinal manipulations help eliminate stress, which exacerbates such conditions, Peden said. “Certainly, stress can worsen diseases, but if the element of stress is removed, you can have a beneficial effect,” he added.

Whether it was stress that caused the unbearable, itchy rashes covering her body each time she ate seafood and eggs is not certain, but Mai Phạm Lê, Patrick and John’s mother, credits chiropractic with eliminating this problem that plagued her most of her adult life.

Since she began regular treatments with Grant — she now is her son’s client — Leâ can eat the once forbidden foods to her heart’s delight, she said.

“Chiropractic had a profound impact on my family’s life and I know that people out there can also benefit from it, if they just understand the premise behind it,” Patrick said.

Patrick’s clients are fortunate, because chiropractors like him “have only one purpose,” to help others feel their best, especially those in his own Vietnamese American community,” Grant said. He is “one of those people who really want to be proactive. His heart yearns to see the whole community” understand the benefits of chiropractic. “He’s walking the talk,” Grant said.

To spread the word, Patrick hosts a 10-minute weekly program on Vietnamese radio. During the show, he offers examples of how chiropractic works and explains how it’s “a great path that people can take for their well being,” he said.

Client Kimmy Phạm of nearby Garden Grove certainly is living well for the first time in 40 years, she said, thanks to Patrick and her thrice-weekly spinal adjustments. Phaïm, 49, hurt herself in a fall when she was just 8 years old, suffering from countless headaches, insomnia and low appetite ever since, she said.

That is, until she went to the center a few months ago, after hearing Patrick on the air. Prior to the treatments, she had taken numerous medicines prescribed by doctors, and later Chinese herbs, all without result, she said. In many cases, both pills and herbs only made her feel ill.

After receiving her initial treatment from Patrick, she slept well for the first time in years, she remembered. Now, “I feel pretty well, I sleep well” and am “hungry all time. Everything tastes good to me.”

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