Listening Differently & Saving Lives

One patient’s story of Healthcare Advocacy, unicorns, and how the experts at Fraum are “always listening.”

Global Healthcare Advocacy is gaining attention at Fraum and throughout the medical community. Rather than taking our word for it, the real impact can only be fully appreciated from the perspective of our clients experiencing total life (and body) change for themselves.

Case Study:

Jennifer had been a chiropractic patient for wellness and injury since 2001 after surviving a terrible head-on collision which injured her neck and back. She discovered the benefits of chiropractic when, as she describes, “Western medicine decided that my only source of relief would be surgery and a life of pain medication. This was a remedy that I declined, knowing there was a better way.” Having managed to find “the very best chiropractors around” wherever her family lived, her first step after relocating to Bluffton, was to find the best here, which landed her at the Fraum Center for Restorative Health.

“During my initial consultation,” Jennifer recalls, “Dr. Fraum set up a treatment plan that was very straightforward and easy to understand. As a wellness patient of Dr. Fraum’s, I was adjusted twice a week, tailored to specific needs. In this kind of care, your chiropractor gets to know and understand what’s going on with your body to the point of being able to tell when something else is wrong.”

Like many, Jennifer had gone through a litany of specialists for peri-menopause related issues and was getting worse with each new regimen. “Dr. Fraum could see my decline, exhaustion, and weakness, and intervened. He suggested I have an appointment with Dr. H., explaining she sees things through a different lens of both western medicine and chiropractic. She is a unicorn.”

Jennifer emphasizes, “There is something different about both Dr. Fraum and Dr. H. They listen differently and have a careful balance of treating an ailment, but also finding the source of the ailment and correcting it, instead of just medicating it and putting a Band-Aid on a much larger problem.”

A common core of Fraum’s practice, that approach can sometimes be life-and-death, as it was recently in Jennifer’s case. She’d been deteriorating with severe cold and flu symptoms but like many moms, Jennifer kept pushing through. However, a text exchange with Dr. H. advised Jennifer to “go to the ER immediately” for a presumed case of pneumonia.

“I remembered Dr. Fraum saying he ‘believed in Dr. H. solidly,’ if she made a diagnosis or a judgment, which was the reason I listened and headed to the ER with my husband – where I was diagnosed with pneumonia.” After walking on her own accord to the ambulance for a transfer to a facility with an open bed, Jennifer recalls, “We made a right turn, and I woke up 6 days later. If I hadn’t listened to Dr. H., I would have passed out at home, in front of my children, in my sleep. None of which would have a good ending.”

Jennifer was put on a ventilator to save her life, spent several weeks in ICU and then rehab, and credits not only Dr. H.’s knowledgeable diagnosis, but the practice’s relational care saying, “As their schedules allowed, [Dr. H. and Dr. Fraum] each came to visit me and spent time with me. I am 100% confident that they both have my very best interest at heart and are truly invested in seeing my care through to the ultimate success, which is healing in itself.” 

“I trust them implicitly,” Jennifer concludes. “I don’t say that lightly. They are always listening. What you may think is an irrelevant detail, could be the very thing that could change – or even save your life.”