When the world's
best clinics said
"I'm sorry."
Earlier in practice · Internal medicine
As a young doctor, I was not yet 30. Full of ambition, discipline, faith in science, faith in pills. I believed everything I had been taught at medical school. And then life happened.
After lifting heavy weights, severe pain in my cervical spine. Diagnosis: multiple protrusions and herniations of the cervical spine, with compression of the spinal cord.
My Ukrainian colleagues and professors, doctors in America, Israel, Germany, I wrote everywhere. SOS, please help. The verdict came back: a wheelchair. Lie down. Rest. Symptomatic therapy. Thirty years ago, this diagnosis was poorly understood. I was supposed to accept my future.
One year later: tennis.
Today: a full life.
I refused that future. A year later I returned to the professor who had given me the diagnosis. I invited him to play tennis. He did not believe his eyes. He did not even recognise me at first. He recognised me only by my bright red hair.
I had always studied medicine more deeply than the standard protocols. I am a hereditary physician. I never quite believed in pills as the only solution. So drawing on what I knew, I began to build my own system of recovery.
Today I work with patients and students all over the world. My system is not a magic pill. My system is work. Faith, always. But it works, grounded in 40+ years of clinical experience.