In our 1996-1997 studies, Dr. Garrison persuaded Baylor College of Medicine, where he was a faculty member, to collaborate with us in several ways. He got the College to contribute a research methodologist to make sure our study design was sound, and he arranged for a professional statistician to double-check Jackie’s and my statistics. He also arranged for our research subjects, without cost to our foundation or research patients, to undergo bone densitometry as part of the studies.

Through frequent and long telephone conversations, Dr. Garrison helped Jackie and me ensure that our recent metabolic studies were methodologically sound. In these two studies, we compared the resting metabolic rates of fibromyalgia patients to those of healthy controls, finding that patients had significantly lower rates. He and I had long talks discussing proper statistical tests, their interpretation, and the meaning of the study outcomes to metabolic rehab.

I certainly appreciate the minor help of others involved in these studies. But I can’t find the words to express my gratitude for the intellectual help Dr. Garrison gave Jackie and me. His intense and incisive brainwork helped us to make the quality of these studies as high as possible.

For a while during the 1990s, Dr. Garrison and I cotreated fibromyalgia patients. When he transferred to the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, he successfully treated hundreds more. When I left Houston in late 1997, the brilliant chiropractic physician Dr. Paul Breeding took over local collaboration with Dr. Garrison. Together, they continued to help patient-after-patient recover, and coauthored a paper for Medical Hypotheses on fibromyalgia and thyroid hormone resistance.

Dr. Garrison was one of the smartest and most courageous physicians I have ever known. He took hard hits for his brave stance that we were right: that too little thyroid hormone regulation is the basis of most patients’ fibromyalgia. The hardest hits came from physicians who promoted the pseudo-scientific and quack notion that fibromyalgia is a psychiatric disorder. But he stood his ground and absorbed the political blows. His courage in the face of damaging political opposition in medicine was like that of my old friend Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD. He, too, is now deceased, but he directly took on conventional medicine in the 1980s. In doing so, he was almost single-handedly responsible for the justified contempt today of millions of people for the harm done by conventional medicine. He, like Dr. Garrison, risked his personal career for the sake of truth and protecting patients.

Dr. Garrison and I didn’t agree on all matters. But our friendship was bound by a love of quality scientific work and the mission of freeing fibromyalgia and hypothyroid patients from the misery imposed on them by the false beliefs of conventional medicine. He and I sometimes went a year or so without talking, but then one of us finally would contact the other, driven by some exciting development related to the line of research he and I had long been engrossed in.

We disagreed over some tentative conclusions, especially about some possible contributions to and mechanisms of fibromyalgia. But this didn’t drive us apart as friends or research colleagues; instead, our disagreements brought us closer together. His brilliant challenging of my own conjectures stimulated my thinking, in stark contrast to the fruitless minds of most other fibromyalgia researchers.

Dr. Garrison’s fertile mind made him a prolific hypothesizer, as am I, and this inevitably carried us, at least for a time, in different intellectual and research directions. But our differences didn’t weaken the bond I had with him, nor, I hope, the bond he felt with me. Our differences, arising from discussions of theoretical and experimental science, enriched both his and my mind.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in deep sorrow over the loss of Dr. Garrison, and I don’t expect my sorrow to wane with time. I don’t yet know the cost to Jackie’s and my research of not having Richard to collaborate with. But whatever the cost, it’s already been compensated by the immense contributions he made during the time he was with us.

What can one finally say upon losing so prematurely such an extraordinary friend and colleague? I can only borrow words from Dr. Garrison’s and my friend Dr. Paul Breeding: I’ll miss you, brother.