Update: Intro, and Book Review Part A, Fibromyalgia Mystery Still Unsolved, or The Debunking of the Fibromyalgia Relief Centers and Paul Whitcomb, DC

This post was originally published on 4/5/08. I was just responding to recent a comment to it and decided to check its links. I saw that there is at least one important dead link, so I'm updating the post and re-publishing it.

The Whitcomb series have been ever popular on my blog (check the sidebar for titles and links to all of them). I was just checking the stats for this particular post on statcounter.com, and I see that someone has visited it 212 times. That seems a little odd to me. Anyone have any ideas for me on that?

Anyway, on with the update. Any changes I've made are in green italics.


"Silence is fraud's best friend. Word of mouth is fraud's worst enemy. Pass the word!" Fraud Aid

Let me say this first and foremost: There is no cure for Fibromyalgia. If there were a cure for Fibromyalgia I would know about it.

There. Is. No. Cure.

Why, you might ask, am I doing this? I'm really tired of Dr. Whitcomb's holdings (book, website) coming up when I do a legitimate search on just about anything to do with Fibromyalgia. And now I'm actually getting email from well meaning friends and acquaintances, like this:

Subject: Fibromyalgia diag.&cure-really!

I stumbled upon the Dr. that figured out what fibromyalgia is and has learned to test for it and treat it and give folks their lives back. I got the testing which relieved me from virtually all my "phantom pain" and got up and walked around in a straight up position. Realized later as I watched others getting the test that I was also sitting up straight in my wheelchair. I sat about 3 feet away from the goings on and saw weary faces lie down and get up smiling and with some color in their faces and the tiredness was completely eased. This test helps temporarily. One needs to go in for 3 times a day 6 days a week for up to 8-10 weeks. The therapy is different than the test. I think you and I got jarred something fierce when that rope swing broke when we were swinging double. In other words, I think our necks got misaligned and we have suffered all these years, gradually getting worse, spending most of our time in bed. There is a lot of information your can look up on: stopfibro.com. Dr. Paul Whitcomb had it himself and knows what a debilitating disease this is. It has to do with choking off of the menegis that surround the nerves that go thru the neck making the nerves misfire, telling you that you hurt in places that you regular doctor tells you nothing is wrong with. I will try to get these treatments when I can, but I can tell you that just from the test I feel like I have a large portion of my life back. Let me know what you think when you read up on the at the above website.

I'm doing this blog post (the first in a series) so there will be some truth to the hype on the internet, available to anyone who takes the precaution of doing a search on the person (Paul Whitcomb, DC), book (Fibromyalgia: Finally Solving the mystery), or business (Fibromyalgia Relief Centers) in question. The email above, and the fact that now I'm reading about people who say they have been bankupted and/or made worse off physically than they were before they began "The Whictomb Method", inspired me to take this on.

I first became aware of Dr. Whitcomb through a co-worker on The Million Letter Campaign of 2005. She was sending Dr. Whitcomb’s info around, spreading the word that he would like to come to support group meetings around the country to speak about FM. I googled him and found his website for The Fibromyalgia Relief Centers. My big clue came as soon as I read that he had a "cure" for FM. (I notice he doesn't make that claim on his website anymore. Probably how he avoids being convicted of fraud. But more on that aspect later.) I would know if there was a cure. There was no cure then and there is no cure now. At this point in time I don't trust anyone who says there is. I told my co-worker about my doubts, and as I recall, she pooh-poohed them. She learned better later, but that's a whole different story. She was looking hard for a spokesperson for FM and I guess her hopes for Dr. W to be that person overshadowed her common sense.

Where to begin? Let me start with the book. The picture on the cover is really nice. One of the best pictures of fascia I've ever seen. (Aside: except for this one - look out, this picture is rather graphic!)

On the back of the book is a review by Ellen Tanner Marsh, "bestselling NY Times author."

The book review is also posted on Whitcomb’s website here. You should go there and read it now.
{The review is no longer posted on Whitcomb's site. Nor is he selling the book on his site, and Amazon has only copies sold by outside sellers. Anyone have any idea why the cheapest copy is $37.86??? I saved a copy of the review and you can now see it here.}


Isn't that special?

A cursory search on “New York Times best-selling author Ellen Tanner Marsh” reveals - she writes fiction!!! Her "NYT best-selling author"status comes from two paperback romance novels in the 80's. (Correction: she wrote more books than that. Go here if you want to see them.) And that's not even the best part. The best part is that she's employed by BookSurge (which is a vanity press now a subsidiary of amazon.com, for amateur writers who want to see their manuscripts in print; it's a relatively new service in the digital age, also called "books-on-demand" or "print-on-demand"). Ms. Tanner is paid by BookSurge to write reviews of the books they publish; BookSurge is paid $399.00 by the author of the book being reviewed by Ms. Tanner.

Ms. Tanner is said to be an especially prolific paid reviewer. And she is expert enough to write reviews for books on everything from The Last Voyage of the Cosmic Muffin to The Beer Drinkers "Diet". Ms. Tanner writes gushingly positive reviews of books for BookSurge…check these sites for details:

Ellen Tanner Marsh's Paid-For Blurbs Are Scintillating and Will Leave You Floored, in Gawker.com, and

Raves for Sale, by Bonnie Goldstein for Slate on 1/19/07.

For $399 Ellen Tanner Marsh will like your book

Pretty unbelieveable , huh? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I have so much more information on this topic that I'm going to give it a dedicated group of web pages called "Quackery", on TheICIExperience.org. And I'm going to open up the comments section of this blog post to anyone who wants to post a negative review of Whitcomb's book on Amazon. Because there's a funny thing that happens to negative reviews of this book on Amazon: they disappear. At the request of the author of the book. I've been watching this happen for literally years.

Today, April 5, I posted the message below on amazon.com under the "Create Your Own Review" section of the book "Fibromyalgia: Finally Solving the Mystery."

Subject: Post your negative reviews of this book/website/chiropractor on my blog
and I promise it will not "disappear."

Post your negative reviews to www dot theiciexperience dot blogger dot com//2008/03/fibromyalgia-mystery-still-unsolved-or.html

Read the first part of my review of this book at the same address, above.

Tags: Fibromyalgia: Finally Solving the Mystery, Dr. Paul E. Whitcomb, Dr. Paul Whitcomb, Paul E. Whitcomb DC, Paul Whitcomb DC, The Fibromyalgia Relief Centers, The Whitcomb Method