QUESTION: Will balancing the meninges help
alt.dental.mercury.filling.poisoning?
MESSAGE: One has to trust doctors to make decisions, not
alt.health.care.people!
JOEL
Posted on Tue, Apr. 06, 2004
Beloved doctor to begin prison term
By Larry Fish
Inquirer Staff Writer
SUGARLOAF, Pa. - A trim, modest mother of four, a pillar of her
church, and someone hundreds of people from throughout North America
are willing to swear by, is to surrender today to begin an 18-month
sentence in federal prison.
To her many passionate supporters, Joanne Gallagher - "Dr. Joanne" to
the thousands who have come almost as pilgrims to her Luzerne County
chiropractic office in Pennsylvania's coal country - is a talented
healer, and a victim.
But to others, Gallagher, 44, is getting off far too easy.
Dawn Strohecker's daughter, Kimberly, 31, of Halifax, Pa., died on
April 29, 1999, in what prosecutors termed "a horrible death," in
nearly constant epileptic seizures, while in Gallagher's care. The
death certificate said that vomit in her lungs, a result of untreated
seizures, led to fatal pneumonia.
"This whole thing is about money," Strohecker said recently. "My
daughter died the most horrific death for this woman's greed."
Strohecker said she did not know until after Kimberly's death that she
had been seeing Gallagher, whose techniques she described as "all this
witchcraft."
Gallagher, who had to give up her license, said in an interview last
week that she never interfered with Kimberly Strohecker's medical
treatment for epilepsy or urged her to stop taking anti-seizure
medicines. Her goal with Strohecker and all her patients, Gallagher
said, was to use her form of chiropractic to make them "healthier for
healing, that's all."
Gallagher's specialty has been "balancing the meninges," the membranes
covering the spinal cord and brain. She says she has done that by
"low-force, very safe" treatments, lightly passing her hands up and
down the spine.
It is a form of treatment that chiropractor Charles A. Bender, who was
prepared to testify against Gallagher, said could not possibly help
physically.
"There is absolutely no science to support her claims with respect to
'balancing the meninges' with tonal treatments," said Bender, whose
practice is in Central New Jersey.
Townspeople, backed up by a file of more than 700 letters sent in her
behalf, said that Gallagher was so respected in her field that
hundreds of patients would come regularly from Iowa; Alberta, Canada;
Chicago; and New York for her tonal treatments.
After Strohecker's death, her mother pressed the district attorney in
Schuylkill County, where the death occurred, to charge Gallagher with
involuntary manslaughter. But then-District Attorney Claude A.L.
Shields said evidence was insufficient for such a charge.
Federal prosecutors, believing that a crime had occurred, filed nine
federal charges against Gallagher. All concerned billing Medicaid or
the state for Strohecker's treatment, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon
Zubrod said.
The trial ended in a mistrial after one day, and Gallagher pleaded
guilty last year to one count of mail fraud. She is expected to
surrender today in Danbury, Conn., where she also is to serve out her
sentence.
Much, but not all, of the federal government's case against Gallagher
was presented at her sentencing hearing, said Mary Catherine Frye, the
other federal prosecutor on the case.
Frye said witnesses would have testified that Gallagher urged
Strohecker and at least one other epileptic patient to abandon the
medications that had controlled their seizures. Strohecker had been
taking up to 16 pills a day to control her seizures, which began when
she was 6, her mother said.
Chiropractic was established more than 100 years ago on the theory
that people often suffer misalignments of the spine. Chiropractors
attempt to manipulate the spine into place. Some, though by no means
all, medical doctors see value in chiropractic, to complement medical
treatment.
But prosecutor Frye said Gallagher went far beyond the bounds of
chiropractic by saying she was able to treat epilepsy and Down's
syndrome, both medically incurable.
Gallagher denies ever making those claims; Frye said witnesses would
have testified otherwise. Epilepsy is the disruption of electrical
signals in the brain, usually marked by convulsive attacks.
Dawn Strohecker, of Halifax, did not know that Kimberly and her
boyfriend, Troy Schade, began seeing Gallagher in her Hazleton office
in 1998.
Gallagher said in the interview that she never directly discussed
epilepsy with Kimberly Strohecker.
"My focus was always on her adjustment," Gallagher said.
Marcella Schade, Troy's mother, had Kimberly stay with her for a while
and witnessed one of the tonal treatments.
"I never saw anything like it," Schade said at Gallagher's sentencing
hearing last month. She said Gallagher appeared to merely wave her
hands over Strohecker's head and mumble rapid phrases.
Schade, as she tended the increasingly ill woman, grew more and more
doubtful.
Schade secretly recorded her distraught last telephone call to
Gallagher, less than a day before Strohecker died, as the ill woman
thrashed in nearly constant seizures.When Gallagher's defense learned
of the tape, they requested a mistrial, and it was granted.
According to the tape transcript, introduced at sentencing, Schade
told Gallagher: "I am just really nervous over this. Is she supposed
to, like, seizure like this, that it's foaming, and be this bad?"
Gallagher told Schade repeatedly that Strohecker was going through a
withdrawal from her anti-seizure drugs.
"Patients who change with the meninges, which she's done, if they're
not on medication they do phenomenal," Gallagher said.
Several times, Schade asked: "She won't die on us or get brain damage
from letting it go like this?"
Gallagher responded that Strohecker seemed to be going through the
most critical point of her recovery.
"Eventually you will see her just go into a peaceful sleep," Gallagher
said, on the tape. "And it's going to take her brain a little while.
She's going to be tired for a while, but she'll recover."
Gallagher said repeatedly that Troy, acting for Strohecker, had the
choice of returning to medical treatment.
But Schade, who said in court she trusted Gallagher as a trained
professional, kept asking for reassurance: "But, like I said, nobody
with this, with epilepsy has ever died going through this?"
"Not that I have worked with," Gallagher replied.
Robert Ritz, one of the character witnesses at the sentencing hearing,
said he and his wife, Sally, had been seeing Gallagher for several
years before his wife died of cancer.
He said that Gallagher had never claimed to them to be able to do
anything other than adjust their meninges and that Gallagher never
tried to get his wife to reduce her medications.
"She is without a doubt one of the finest people I've ever known in my
life," Ritz said of Gallagher.
Gallagher led 200 supporters in a courtroom prayer at her sentencing
hearing.
On March 25, more than 250 of Gallagher's neighbors, patients and
supporters asked the Rev. Joe Evanko for a special Mass for Gallagher
at the parish she devoutly attends, St. John Bosco in Sugarloaf.
Gallagher said she wished she could take back that night before
Strohecker died and could see that she got to a hospital.
And she wished that she and Dawn Strohecker could be "reconciled," but
Kimberly's mother will have none of it.
Strohecker can see Kimberly's grave from her front door, and she said
she could not understand how the court system could fail to hold
Gallagher more responsible.
"There is no justice for Kimberly," she said.
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Contact staff writer Larry Fish at 610-313-8109