(2.25) Jack Wolfson
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Dr. Paul Wolfson was the life of the party – an incredible storyteller filled with jokes, who also finished first in his class. I still encounter his classmates who marvel at his photographic memory. This doctor – my father – was my most important mentor and ultimate hero.
But in his mid-fifties, he suddenly became depressed. Doctors and their pills couldn’t help. Then he started having trouble swallowing, frequent falls, and a loss of facial expression, leaving him a shell of the man he was. The MD’s called in Parkinsonism and eventually PSP. Every doctor seemed to be another pill pusher; one diagnosis after the other, with no one interested in understanding exactly what was going on. My dad died in 2007 after only meeting my son Noah once.
Hardened and saddened by his condition and the obliviousness of the docs, I felt hopeless. After all, I was a doctor, too. I kept thinking, “Why couldn’t I help my father in the way I desperately wanted to? Would I suffer the same fate?” The answers came through a chance meeting at a local farmer’s market…
It was there that I met my future wife, Heather, a chiropractor who insisted that most doctors were just attempting to cover up problems, not healing anyone. This epiphany of cause – what it meant to be a doctor boldly searching for the root of a patient’s problem (most often poor nutrition and exposure to chemicals) was where our focus should lie, and that science actually defended this idea.
