easier on my hands to do this.-- kate

Vitamin therapy eases pain for fibromyalgia patients
06:22 PM PDT on Thursday, May 19, 2005

By JEAN ENERSEN / KING 5 News

Highly concentrated vitamin injections may change the lives of 6 million
people living with fibromyalgia.

Three years ago, Jeanne Langlais had trouble lifting everything and ached
all over.

"Couldn't paint anymore," she said. "I couldn't lift my arms up. Your thighs
ached when you stood up, my arms ached, my neck ached. I couldn't understand
why."

Chronic pain forced her into early retirement. After two years of tests, she
finally got the diagnosis: fibromyalgia. But finding a treatment was another
story.

"Anti-inflammatories, pain killers, anti-depressants, and none of them
worked for me," she said.

She sought an alternative treatment called intravenous micronutrient
therapy. IVMT is a cocktail of highly concentrated vitamins injected into
the vein.

"About the fifth treatment I started to feel better, and by the sixth
treatment I had no pain,” she said. “I was clicking my heels."

Dr. David Katz, a Yale-trained physician, is one of a few doctors using
IVMT. He's treated more than 60 patients so far and the majority of them
have had good results.

"If I'm able to help patients who for years have suffered and couldn't find
help -- it doesn't get any better than that," says Katz, who is now a
preventive medicine specialist at Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center in
Derby, Conn.

He is conducting a clinical trial on IVMT sponsored by the National
Institutes of Health. He said the treatment has few side effects, but a
major drawback is cost. It's not covered by insurance, at least not yet.

"If we prove that this is a cost-effective therapy for fibromyalgia, it then
becomes a reimbursable commodity," Dr. Katz said.

For Jeanne, the $55-weekly injections are a hardship. But she'll continue
them because of the promising picture they paint for a future without pain.

The treatment also goes by the name Myer's Cocktail after the doctor who
invented it.

and this link pertains to the IVMT for Fibromyalgia clinical trials:

http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct/show/NCT00067405?order=1.