After reliving the foot incident I was reminded of another medical mishap.

When I was around 14 years old I was diagnosed with scoliosis and was told I would need to wear a back brace. Well really I was first told that I would need surgery and would never have children, which to a 14 year old was pretty traumatic, but after dealing with my Mom I guess the Dr’s settled for just the brace and a better approach to talking to children.

So here’s the run down; I get diagnosed, I get a Boston Brace and wear it for 6 months. My mom does a lot of research and finds this holistic approach to scoliosis with the COPES brace.

COPES is based out of Baton Rouge, LA. We get a few cool family vacations as we were supposed to travel there every 6 months for a check up, which should have been a clue as to how crazy this program was. By holistic, they meant holistically ruin your entire life. They took a hair sample, blood sample, spit sample, did a muscle test, x-rays, etc, etc. I thought I might end up like Marie Curie after the first visit.

Their program looked something like this:

I was supposed to wear the brace 23 out of 24 hours a day.

I was on a diet in which I could only eat fruit, vegetables and meat. No cheese, bread, dairy, or processed foods basically.

I did an 18 minute stretching routine.

I did an 18 minute muscle stimulation routine.

I did an 18 minute neck traction routine.

I did an 18 minute lay-on-torture-board-thing.

(are you adding this? Even if I only did 3 of these things, I was out of the brace for 54 minutes.)

And I saw a chiropractor 3 times a week.

All of that sucked, but not near as much as the brace itself. It went from my hips to my collar bone. It was awkward to fit under clothes (which I could only really wear sweat pants and t-shirts), and was noticeable on my small frame. I still have nightmares where I drop my pencil in a classroom and can’t bend to pick it up. Or dreams where I have to take it off because the pain is so unbearable, only to realize I don’t have a bra on (because I couldn’t wear one under the plastic) and my undershirt is drenched in sweat.

I wore this brace for about 4 years.

It sucked, but I’m totally fine now, and like the foot incident, really don’t remember that much of it unless I consciously start thinking about it.

But this is the best part! COPES was run by a man who pretended to be a doctor! All those tests, the requirements, that terrible brace, was thought up by someone, who never went to medical school. He was also convicted of insurance fraud.

I never ever look up scoliosis stuff. The pictures on the internet are, of course, of the worst cases known to man. I don’t need images of twisted circus freaks in my mind. Because of this, I didn’t find out about my fraud doctor until I had a friend get diagnosed with scoliosis and was telling her about the COPES program. Google let me know my doctor was a quack.