The Headache Godfather

The Story of Dr. Seymour Diamond and How He Revolutionized the Treatment of Headaches

Seymour Diamond, Charlie Morey

• Editore: Skyhorse
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629149806
• Argomento: Medicine
• Categoria: Medicine Biographies

Learn the story of a man who lived the American dream and improved the quality of life for thousands of headache sufferers. The Headache Godfather traces the life of Seymour Diamond, MD, who was born in 1925, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Slovakia, in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. Diamond revolutionized the practice of headache as a medical specialty when he opened the United States' first private headache practice, the Diamond Headache Clinic, in 1974. It quickly became a headache haven for sufferers from around the world. He also established a nonprofit organization, the National Headache Foundation, to support research for headache relief and to spread the knowledge among doctors and headache sufferers alike.At eighty-nine years of age, Dr. Diamond looks back on his battles with the Food and Drug Administration over headache treatments, the political skirmishes with those who would block his will to succeed, his globe-trotting adventures to learn and share current headache knowledge, the hundreds of thankful patients who claim that his headache treatment saved their lives, a frightening and painful malpractice lawsuit, and even a relationship with a Chicago Mafia member whose family Dr. Diamond treated early in his medical career, and who was ultimately found in the trunk of a stolen automobile, shot to death.Seymour Diamond is a living example of an individual who succeeded at living the American dream. Working several jobs while attending college and medical school, applying his intelligence, energy, and imagination to the world of headache medicine, and providing for his wife, Elaine, and their family of three daughters while building an empire of headache health, Seymour Diamond is indeed the Headache Godfather.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

1. You Saved My Life!

In a series of cards and letters that Dr. Seymour Diamond received after announcing his retirement from the Diamond Headache Clinic, there’s a phrase that appears frequently and is most often followed by an exclamation point: “You saved my life!”

You might expect that statement in a letter to an emergency-room physician who’d literally helped his patients cheat death when they’d suffered physical trauma from automobile accidents or other violent disasters, but Seymour is a headache doctor. And these expressions of gratitude come from people who suffered from diseases that had no treatment—and little respect as an actual disease—until Dr. Diamond, with his pioneering headache-medicine mentors and peers, accepted their patients’ head pain complaints as legitimate and treatable medical conditions.

“Thanks for saving my life! Until you took my case, I was on a downward spiral. You made all the difference in getting me turned around,” states one letter from a man in Decatur, Illinois.

“Congratulations on all that you have accomplished to help young and old eliminate painful headaches and truly live life again. Thank you for giving me my life back!” says another from a woman in Chicago. She goes on to add, “I have known you for over thirty years, and I have seen your determination, passion, compassion, humility, pride, understanding, patience, and love of your work and patients. That was your success, and it continues!”

A woman from Kalamazoo, Michigan, says, “I’ll never be able to express my gratitude for your being the famous doctor who really believed there were these awful headaches. Thousands must share in the miracles you gave us. I found hope from day one when I first saw you. You patted me on the knee and said, ‘I’ll help you . . .’ After seeing nineteen doctors over a seven-year period, I knew you’d help me. Several days later, I awoke headache-free—Wow! How blessed I’ve been to know you as a doctor and a true friend.”

A fellow M.D. from California begins her letter with that same familiar phrase, “Thank you sincerely for saving my life! Your care was exceptional, beyond mere competence. (A UCLA neurologist and a Stanford psychiatrist have been competent, but unsuccessful.) Upon regaining consciousness and clarity, I was curious to parse the elements explaining why you at the Diamond Headache Clinic succeeded so well where others had not. May I offer a few ideas?

“Your initial assessment was performed by a highest-skilled physician, not a generalist, with speed, thoroughness, precise neurological exam, in-depth history, and rapid-processing through ‘rule-out’ imaging.

“Diamond Headache Clinic’s core is a select team of headache-dedicated experts with very extensive (half a century) clinical experience. The team is unique, well-organized, and ‘on the same page.’ Leadership is evident.

“The nursing team members are all fluent in treatment protocols, dosing, side effects, and outcome benchmarks. The R.N. team was confident, proud of their association with the Diamond Headache Clinic, and expressed loyalty and affection for the DHC medical faculty.

“A prominent emphasis on nonpharmacological treatment with great respect for (a) brilliant psychological evaluation, (b) salient physical therapy assessment, and (c) classical biofeedback and relaxation rehearsal made very user-friendly.

“As a migraineur for thirty-six years,” she continues, “I happily report no need for a single triptan or opioid in the fifteen weeks since discharge from DHC. Diamond Headache Clinic has a master plan that is standard of care. If only DHC could clone itself!”

The traits witnessed by this thankful headache sufferer came as no accident or coincidence. In fact, Seymour has put much effort into giving his patients a premium level of care, right down to the finest details, including his greeting when he meets them for the first time. Here’s an excerpt from a chapter on the history of headache clinics that Seymour wrote for Dr. Frederick G. Freitag’s book Establishing a Headache Center—From Concept to Practice:

“I learned to greet all patients with a smile and by shaking their hands. The reason that I discuss this scenario in a chapter on the history of headache clinics is because one of the Diamond Headache Clinic’s keys to success was a friendly approach to patients who had been alienated by other physicians. Headache patients are often confronted by a lack of friendliness, indifference, and misconceptions by health care professionals on the nature of headache. The patient with chronic pain, including headache, is seeking empathy as well as treatment. As a matter of rule, I always try to know something personal about the patient (job, children, hobbies), and try to establish a personal relationship. This openness may produce more insight into the patient’s headaches, and facilitate the management of his or her condition. Another feature of a successful practice is to avoid long waiting times at your office, which is unacceptable and creates a barrier between you and your patient. Finally, when dealing with patients, check your ego at the door.”

Seymour’s methods have never been secret. In fact, he’s published seventy-three books and nearly five hundred papers, alone and with coauthors, and he’s delivered hundreds of speaking presentations, including thirty symposia and thirty-four special lectures.

He’s appeared as a headache expert on all the major television networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox) on such programs as Today Show, Larry King Live, 48 Hours, Early Edition, ABC News with Ted Koppel, Dr. Art Ulene, and CBS Morning News.

He’s visited most U.S. states and a number of foreign countries, sharing his treatment knowledge along the way on meetings and discussions. In the early days of his Diamond Headache Clinic, he often invited other doctors to visit his practice to learn his methods. In the heyday of headache as a new medical specialty, the Diamond Headache Clinic reigned supreme.

“I was an energetic guy!” he laughs about it today, but it was his intelligence, education, curiosity, and that energy level, fueled by the problems presented by his patients, that drove him to research and discover new ways to help them manage their headache problems.

Seymour was instrumental in creating the first nonprofit foundation, the National Migraine Foundation, for lay people as well as physicians to benefit from current knowledge of headache treatments. He later reformed the organization into its current iteration, the National Headache Foundation, with its continued purpose to offer assistance to headache sufferers in need.

He fought battle after battle to get insurance coverage for his patients, particularly those requiring inpatient care at his affiliated hospital units, when managed care programs threatened to deny them proper treatment. Ultimately, he formed a committee that created a new standards of care document (instructions for doctors to follow in treatment) specifically for headache patients.

Seymour advised the Food and Drug Administration as a headache expert, and he fought with them over things like the drug Elavil (amitriptyline), the most prescribed drug for pain relief, that has FDA approval only as an antidepressant. When doctors prescribe a drug for anything other than its FDA approved usage, it’s called “off-label” use. It’s legal, and as Elavil proves, it can also be the most effective treatment.

He lists academic posts on his curriculum vitae, both past and current, including a number of professorships, instructor roles, lecturer appearances, and associate professorship positions. Sharing the knowledge has been a passion throughout his tenure as a headache specialist, and in addition to the many patients who write profusely thankful letters to their savior, a significant number of physicians owe Dr. Seymour Diamond a debt of gratitude for helping them understand the complexities of headache treatment.

Seymour will never retire completely. Today, after severing his ties with the clinic he founded, he still heads the National Headache Foundation as Executive Chairman. He’s very much a hands-on individual, and at eighty-nine years of age, he still has work to do, adding to his already voluminous contribution to the welfare of headache sufferers. Born to Jewish Ukrainian/Slovakian parents who left their home countries due to religious persecution, Seymour is a member of the first American-born generation of the Diamond family. He is living proof that the American dream is attainable through hard work and determination applied intelligently. And we’re lucky to have him. Except for a fortunate decision made by his parents in 1924, he might not have been born at all. . . .

2. A Child Is Born

It was Rose Diamond’s birthday. She was twenty-six years old, and she was about to enter the hospital for the birth of her second child. A brisk spring breeze off Lake Michigan tugged at her hair, and a chill rippled down her back as she looked up at the imposing face of Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital. She turned to her husband Nathan and smiled up at him, then gasped as a labor pain wracked her small figure. The baby was due.

The baby. She and Nathan had a long and difficult talk when they’d discovered her pregnancy. They had three children already, and they shared their small third-story walk-up apartment with two other adults, her mother Clara Roth and sister Esther. In 1925, only four years before the start of America’s Great Depression, it was hard to earn enough money to support themselves, much less another young mouth that would need to be fed, clothed, and educated.

Nathan waited, concern etching his face, until her pain subsided, then smiled back at her, and they approached the last few steps leading to the hospital lobby.

They’d discussed “alternatives” to the birth, hesitating to use the word abortion. But they were Jewish emigrants—he from Kiev, Ukraine, and she from Kremnica, Slovakia—having come to the United States as children, and Old World family values were cherished, even here in America.

They would have the child. They would find a way to get by. They had already done more difficult things.

Nathan had left his family in Kiev at the age of twelve to escape the ire of his father’s second wife, living with his grandmother until he turned eighteen. He then traveled to the United States with his cousin’s family. They weren’t alone. Between 1880 and 1914, two million Jews fled the Russian Empire to escape persecution, and the exodus continued following WWI.

Repeated mob attacks, called pogroms, against Jewish citizens; the conversion of an anti-Semitic novel into a publically published document called “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”; and further persecution against Jews motivated Nathan’s cousin’s family and thousands of others to risk the transatlantic trip to America.

They crossed the Atlantic Ocean by boat, passed through Ellis Island, and eventually made their way to Chicago, where they had relatives. Nathan found work during the day and attended English classes at night. He had a salesman’s natural gift of gab, and he made a point of removing any hint of an accent, giving his new language a perfect Midwestern twang.

Rose climbed the stone steps, embraced in her husband’s strong arms to assure a safe ascent. They rested a moment, then opened the hospital doors and stepped inside.

In Chicago, Nathan had met a woman, fallen in love, married, and they’d had two children, Alfred and Ann. But the marriage ultimately failed, and Nathan received custody of the children. Then, when he and Rose were married, they added daughter Idell, now eighteen months old.

Nathan was a likable man. He did well in sales, and eventually he’d open a clothing store in Chicago with a partner. The store would do well until the stock market crash of 1929, when they would file for bankruptcy and lose their business. After that, he’d sell insurance for Metropolitan Life, a vocation he’d approach with less enthusiasm than clothing sales but nonetheless provided a good living for his family.

The diminutive couple was directed to follow a nurse who helped Nathan with the paperwork, then showed him to the waiting room as another nurse led Rose away to be prepped for the delivery. She smiled happily. It was her birthday, and she was looking forward to the shared celebrations with her new child.

Rose Roth had traveled to America with her mother Clara Roth and three sisters under somewhat less dire circumstances than Nathan’s. Life in Slovakia was hard. Religious intolerance combined with a poor standard of living drove many from their birth country. Following anti-Jewish riots in the early 1880s, and in reaction to the Reception Law (which put Jews on the same level of acceptance as Christians), the Slovak Clerical People’s Party was formed to oppose liberalism and specifically limit Jewish influence. For the young mother traveling with four daughters, America seemed to offer the most promise for a bright future.

Nathan paced the waiting room, following in the footsteps of countless expectant fathers before him, worrying and wondering what was happening in the delivery room. Rose, now well sedated in the fashion of the times, wasn’t worried about anything. She had been through the experience once before with little Idell, and although she was naturally concerned that the baby be born healthy, the birthing experience itself wasn’t high on her list of concerns. As the time approached, nurses gently eased her legs into the stirrups and encouraged her to push.

Rose, like Nathan, had arrived in the United States as a youngster, passing through Ellis Island and ultimately moving on to Chicago. The 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed more people than the sixteen million who had died in WWI, captured teenaged Rose in its grip. Some patients died within hours. Others held on for several days before their lungs filled with fluid, suffocating them. Rose received appropriate treatment and survived, but a resulting viral infection had rendered her nearly deaf, and she wore hearing aids in both ears. Rose was sensitive about the hearing aids and hid them as best she could. The handicap also made her reluctant to join in her husband’s business-related social gatherings due to her inability to hear the conversation clearly and reply in a comfortable manner.

But on this night, she was otherwise healthy, happy, married to a man she’d admired even when he’d been married to his first wife, and ready to give birth to their second child together.

As Rose lay exhausted, the sound of a light slap echoed through the otherwise quiet delivery room followed a split second later by a hearty yowl.

On April 15, 1925, Rose gave birth to a healthy infant whose tiny wristband read “Boy Diamond.”

Two of her sisters, following Jewish tradition, had named their firstborn male children “Samuel” in memory of their deceased father. Rose felt that another Samuel would be confusing. So, she and Nathan honored their little boy with the name Schmiel Moshe, her father’s Hebrew name. But the name that would become well-known in the world of headache medicine would be Seymour Diamond.

3. Times Were Different Then

“I’m lucky to be here,” he says eighty-seven years later in his high-rise apartment overlooking Chicago’s famed Lake Shore Drive and beyond it, Lake Michigan. The year is 2012.

Morning light filters in through translucent ceiling-to-floor blinds hung over huge picture windows. It reflects red-gold highlights onto the nearest wall when it strikes the collection of antique microscopes, safely ensconced in a tall glass display case. Most are made of polished brass, guided through their magnifying motion by knurled knobs and intricate gears. There’s even one crafted from wood for young early nineteenth-century wannabe scientists called a Nuremberg Toy Tripod Microscope. Others date back to the 1600s.

A colorful glass bowl from the Baskets series by sculptor Dale Chihuly refracts another filtered sunbeam into a fan-shaped peacock-tail pattern across the contemporary glass-topped coffee table. A smaller multicolored glass bowl created by Lino Tagliapietra catches some of the Chihuly-enhanced beams, bouncing them onward into the room.

The back walls of the living room are lined with gray polished wood bookcases and electronic entertainment cabinets, designed by his architect/designer daughter Judi Diamond-Falk, as is the entire half-floor apartment.

Art defines the other walls. A Walt Kuhn oil painting of a nude enhances one spot, and a Ben Shahn pen-and-ink caricature of a man fills a nook. Max Weber’s tiny painting “The Conversation” sits astride a miniature easel on a low bookcase among coffee-table books about other artists. Musicians sound silent strains in a painting by French-Jewish painter Mané Katz. And there’s more. Much more. It’s a private contemporary art gallery.

Missing are two earlier acquisitions: “Old Fisherman” by George Bellows, a 24” x 19” oil on canvas painting from th...