Ilene Spector, DO - Helping My Effects from Fibromyalgia More and More

It's been such a wonderful pleasure in the last year to see Lumigrate making a difference in the lives of people with chronic illness, which is typically chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome.  The 'Grate Group', as one of them named the group that was regularly convening on our facebook page, has had many of it's members making considerable improvements in their health because in part, the information and support they received from me and Lumigrate.  One of those, and I think it was the one who named it the Grate Group actually, reported that she's gone several days without a headache, and that might be a result of her latching onto the concept of the home page 'You' model and being more empowered as a partner with the physician or physicians on 'her team', and making changes.  One of the things I've been meaning to write about at an appropriate time is a very special provider who I met at the Integrative Medicine Center in November when I attended a seminar one evening. 

Her name is Ilene Spector, and she is a "DO", or doctor of osteopathy.  Ilene lives and sees patients in Crested Butte, which is a ski town that was a mining town in the 'gold mine' years of the 'Wild West' here, and is south and east of here over a couple of pretty challenging passes to drive with the deer and winter weather.  I had her over for breakfast to show her what Lumigrate 'is' and talk about what she was hoping to accomplish in Grand Junction and hope to provide some solutions to her 'barriers' for enough space, referrals, and her 'insurance dilemma' (she walks the walk -- we had oatmeal with flax seeds and nuts with non dairy milk and chai tea).

Ilene is one of a growing number of health care providers who are choosing to be very discerning with what insurances they accept.  Gone are the days that you can presume that medical providers all are set up to 'take' insurance.  I've been a provider -- there was a whopping overhead and long delay in reimbursement -- sometimes almost a year -- and it cut so deeply into my revenues as an occupational therapist that the trend didn't look good for the future after you also pay your assistant, supplies, space rental, insurances, etc.  So when you walk out of a medical office and see what the charge was, don't assume that is what the provider is going to receive.  I chose to develop Lumigrate, in order to bring quality health care to people at a price they can afford and which will allow me to have the kind of life I quit an extremely good job and went back to years of education (which led to my chronic illness problems, I believe -- fumes from human cadavers, brutally difficult coursework one semester in the old style of 'break the ones that can't work as hard as the medical industry requires when you're working'.   

While I am benefitting from the treatments she is doing on me -- finding many things on the left side of my body that were 'glitchy' (my word) and freeing them up with her gentle technique and fascinating percussive device held against my right hip while her left hand moves to different areas of the body for correcting whatever she is so attuned to feeling, I am sorry that the medical business is causing medical providers to have to work so hard, drive distances, and be leading such different lives than they perhaps thought they were going to have in the past when they went the directions they did with their education.  In Dr. Spector's case, she was a homeopath before she returned to osteopathy school.  Her brochure highlights:

• osteopathic manual medicine offers an answer to many problems that have not resolved with conventional medical, surgical or other therapeutic treatments. 
• osteopathic treatment is gentle and non-traumatic and addresses the body as an individualized whole.
• appropriate for newborns on up
• helpful for a wide variety of medical complaints as well as various pain syndromes and recovery from injuries and traumas
• treatment facilitates changes in how the body functions and restores health
• osteopathy in the cranial field is a specialty of Dr. Spector's.  For more information, visit www.cranialacademy.org (this is the website for the organization she is on the board of, and I believe she was president of in the past, if my memory serves correctly). 

I found it interesting that after a very standard intake form, which for me takes about 3x as long to fill out as I think it should due to the complexity of my medical history since having fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue for 15 and 20 years, respectively, after a prolonged 'leading up to' of intermittent symptoms in my late teens and twenties, including a drastic change immediately after an immunization which was the biggest class action lawsuit prior to the tobacco industry, she interviewed me very closely about injuries.  She seemed interested even in the overall benign injuries such as skiing and Rollerblading falls, as well as the bigger ones, such as being dropped as an infant.  But I forgot about getting involved in the doorway of a car a few years ago when it lurched forward when the driver got distracted and didn't have the car in park.  She found all these 'things' with the left side of my body and told me that and later that week I realized the "error of my ways/memory" and called her to tell her what I'd forgotten to include on my history.  

A week or two later my elderly father saw me on Christmas, and I'd just seen him for a couple of days at Thanksgiving, and he mentioned later to my brother in law that seeing me mentally tracking more like I used to was the best part of Christmas.  Around that time I had tried to eliminate the last two prescription medications I was on, as I was feeling side effects from something that was telling me I had too much of something, but I had too much pain at night.  Since then, however, after a couple more treatments with her, one where she focused on the sacrum with her gentle techniques, I felt something that night had changed in that area (which was similar to when something gets 'stirred up' in a good way), and since then I have titrated off of those last two medications on a regular basis.  Yesterday i reported my neck was starting to act like it was out of alignment and she found one thing that she asked if I wanted to have manipulated, which I did, and she had just amazing technique.  I cannot more highly recommend her and this form of manual medicine. 

So I want to thank Dr. Spector for what she is doing for me and I look forward to seeing how 'far my brain will go' on healing.  I appreciate having another wonderful provider represented at Lumigrate.com and look forward to developing something in the Forum area that includes at least this technique.  Since I originally posted this (which I am editing on 4/7/10), I know of several people who have followed the link to the cranial academy that I posted on facebook and who have felt their health moving forward as they make different choices about where they spend their resources (time, energy, money).   

I understand Dr. Spector is most interested in directly treating people, but I hope to get a bit more information represented here in Lumigrate from her in the near future and we'll get something here that will help many other professionals and people with health concerns to heal themselves and others. 

Anyone wishing to make an appointment if you're lucky enough to live in Western Colorado, someone makes  appointments for Dr. Spector at 970/261-0602, and her office/fax # is 970/349-2095.