A few months ago, a friend of ours Margaret Paul told us about her associate, Ericka Chopich, who’d suffered a catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke, likely the result of a two-year struggle with long Covid.

It’s one of the deadliest varieties of stroke, and in Ericka’s case the right side of her body was completely paralyzed, as were her vocal cords, so she couldn’t speak or even swallow.

Doctors predicted that she would require a feeding tube for at least five months and spend four months in a rehabilitative hospital.

A day and a half later, blasted with six CAT scans in a row that she was convinced would just damage her more, Ericka signed herself out of the hospital.

One week later, she was back on solid foods and walking unaided.

Within two weeks of her supposedly life-threatening stroke, Ericka was speaking and tending her horses. All that was left was recovering a bit more tone and pitch in her voice.

How did she do it? Although the hospital staff referred to her as a miracle, after observing her heal faster from stroke than anyone they’ve ever seen, her doctors were not interested in finding out how or why.

One of the key members of her healing team is a noted chiropractor with hundreds, if not thousands, of healing success stories. However, I can refer to him only as Dr. F.M., largely by his own request.

He refused to have his name in print because he has had numerous lawsuits filed against him – not from his patients, but from other medical doctors. They are furious with him because he is treating patients outside his scope of practice. He has the temerity to be seeking out treatment modalities that actually work.

In other words, instead of just using crunch-crack techniques he was taught in chiropractic school, Dr. M. has gone beyond his training, continuously learning other techniques that he’s applied to his patients, with stunning success.

His first treatment with Ericka consisted of using a McLaren Torch, a red-light therapy developed by Australian clinical scientist, acupuncturist and veterinarian surgeon Dr. Brian McLaren that is said to stimulate acupuncture points. Ericka knew the device well, since she used it on her horses.

Dr. M. also used another type of laser therapy to wake up portions of Ericka’s brain and then a vibration device to regulate certain of her hip muscles, which were misfiring. He also worked on her immune system and on some emotional issues he’d picked up.

The other therapist who was key to Ericka’s miracle recovery was Anat Baniel, founder of Anat Baniel Method® and NeuroMovement®. Relying on the brain’s high degree of neuroplasticity, Baniel employs tiny incremental movements to rewire the brain and heal movement difficulties.

Anat’s therapy was carried out via two Zoom calls, in which she instructed Ericka’s partner Margaret to assist her with the subtle movements that would help to heal her right side.

These two practitioners were responsible for extraordinary healing. They should have been applauded and their methods handed out to every stroke rehabilitation unit in the country.

Instead, in the case of Dr. M., he’s been forced to stay in the shadows, rely on word of mouth and dodge attacks from other doctors because they not only cannot understand his methods but also aren’t inclined to investigate them.

The nub of the problem is how medicine is now taught, largely by the long arm of the pharmaceutical industry. Take something basic like depression. A new review indicates what psychiatrists have known all along: that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance.

This latest study demonstrated absolutely no relationship between low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin and depression, thus kicking away the entire platform on which the use of SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) is prescribed, currently to approximately 1 in every 8 Americans over 18 and to nearly a quarter of all American women over 60.

In fact, not one of the 131 studies examined by the evidence-based Cochrane Trial Unit purporting to prove the serotonin theory has shown anything other than bias or questionable clinical significance.

Nevertheless, for some 30 years a kind of amnesia fell over many in the psychiatric profession, who were happy to prescribe something - even something unproven - for a condition they have little other means to treat.

But it goes beyond offering up a drug as a placebo in the hope it will heal patients.

SSRIs got introduced and widely adopted in the 1990s through direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies, which also staged a charm offensive to doctors, offering them five-star junkets and more.

And now we’re seeing the drug industry also rewrite the story of HRT and claiming a new study clears statins of causing muscle weakness, a side effect proven in countless studies, listed in the drug packet inserts by manufacturers and experienced by tens of millions.

That’s why the profession desperately needs doctors like Dr. M. to come out of the shadows. It needs evidence of what’s really working that is not a tall tale told by the pharmaceutical industry.