The Fibromyalgia Research Foundation: In Memory of John L. Gedye, M.B., B.Chir.

In Memory of John L. Gedye, M.B., B.Chir.
December 25, 1932—June 28, 2002

Dr. John C. Lowe
June 29, 2002

Biography of Dr. John L. Gedye

Last night I received an e-mail from Frank Lucatelli, best friend of Dr. John L. Gedye, addressed to Dr. Gedye’s friends and colleagues. Frank wrote:

"My dear friend John L. Gedye left this world for the next this morning, Friday, June 28, 2002 at 10:54 AM while at Beaumount Hospital in Detroit, MI. His passing leaves an empty place behind that few can fill. Anyone who has had the opportunity to experience the keen intellect and caring spirit of this man knows what I mean. He will be greatly missed."

For the rest of the evening, after reading Frank’s e-mail, I felt numb and detached. I think this state of mind was a self-protective mode. John Gedye was dear to me, and for several reasons, his death is a painful loss. Before becoming fully conscious of the loss, some benevolent internal device allowed me time to position myself to absorb the staggering blow—the second in a short time. The first came some two months ago when one of the most important people in my life passed on.

Today, what brought me to squarely face John’s death was the obvious distress of Dr. Gina Honeyman. She feels a strong emotional bond with John, and his absence is painful to her. Their emotional bond formed when John stayed with us in Tulsa, Oklahoma for several days in late 1999. At lunch one day, John told her of his experiences as a young boy during the German air bombing of England. While telling the story, he cried, and she learned of the deep compassion he felt for other human beings and the pain he suffered over the misfortunes of others. The bond Gina felt with John was solidified, I think, at a meeting of alternative doctors in St. Louis we attended in early 2000. At the meeting, Frank Lucatelli and John became tearful in front of the audience of doctors. They had been talking of their diligent work to form an organization of practitioners who had developed promising clinical approaches but were largely blocked from providing them by the good-ol’-boy system of mainstream medicine. It appeared to me that Frank and John’s passion for this mission, and its meaning for the relief of human suffering, overwhelmed them and made them tearful, despite the public circumstance. My enormous respect and affection for John are based partly on what these emotional moments represent: They highlight the emotional underpinnings of his concern for suffering humans. This concern drove his persistence to bring together clinicians and scientists with overlapping interests so that the word about promising, innovative approaches to patient care could spread.

My impression of what’s so upsetting for Gina today is that she’s had time to ponder what she felt for John. He was an extraordinary person for whom she cared a great deal, and the thought of not communicating with him again disturbs her deeply. She commented that in this modern life, we run so relentlessly trying to put out brush fire after brush fire that we end up reserving too little time for the people we care about and value; then, when one of them is suddenly gone, we realize our failure to have spent our time wisely.

Aside from her own emotional bond with John, Gina is also upset over the loss of John from my life. As she said, he was possibly the only physician—other than she—who has truly understood what my work is about, its true quality from the standpoint of science and logic, and what our research has actually shown. She and I are painfully aware that now, we’ll no longer have the occasional uplifting experience of understanding, appreciation, and acceptance by this human being whose judgment was so extraordinarily sound.

Gina is right. John was the rare scientific mind among his medical colleagues. Before becoming a physician, he had been educated as a behavioral psychologist, as was I. Behavioral psychology in those days was far more scientific than medicine has ever been. And most physicians who’ve had the advantage of being educated first in behavioral psychology are conspicuous for their superior understanding of science and their relative exemption from the intellectual shortcomings of most other physicians. John’s and my common background in behavioral psychology and its intellectual benefits formed a bond between us.

John and I first met when he sent me an e-mail in 1996 asking what I thought of Dr. Dennis Wilson’s ideas. I wrote back explaining my objections to most of Wilson’s beliefs, and afterward, he and I occasionally exchanged e-mails. From these communications, it was clear to me that John had immense intellectual stature, and I found the British color of his written thoughts delightful.

John and I finally met in person in May of 1998. The place was the University of Texas, Health Science Center, in Houston. He and I were participants there in the First Congress on Defining a New Paradigm for the Healing Arts. The Congress was the brainchild of a courageous, iconoclastic physician named Dr. Richard Garrison, then with the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. At the time, I was ill with an over-work-induced head cold, but I enthusiastically participated in the Congress, accompanied by my dear friend, longtime editor, and research colleague, Jackie Yellin. While I wanted to have my say at the Congress, my main purpose in attending was to meet in person the distinguished intellectuals who were to attend. These included Dean Black, Ph.D., John Diamond, M.D., and above all, John L. Gedye, M.B., B.Chir.

I formed a strong affinity for John at the Congress. This occurred when I learned of his response to my presentation of my main method for pursuing truth about the nature of fibromyalgia and its treatment: formal logic. Both John and physicist Elizabeth Rauscher (another participant in the Congress) appreciated the crucial role of formal logic in the pursuit of scientific truth. Elizabeth’s appreciation was primed by her having taught philosophy of science—of which formal logic is an indispensable part—as a university professor. John’s appreciation came first from his background in behavioral psychology, which had given him a practical understanding of science. More so, though, his appreciation of formal logic was based on the product of his colossal intellectual thirst. That product was an astonishingly vast and thoroughgoing knowledge of the nature and philosophy of science, as well as the principles and practice of logic. Such knowledge is rare among human beings in general, and in my judgment, almost nonexistent among other physicians including those most prominently involved in medical research. John and I occasionally lamented that the ignorance of science philosophy and logic among medical researchers—including those at the National Institutes of Health and the CDC in the USA, and the equivalent institutions in the UK—is one of the main reasons that so-called medical "science" provides the public with paltry returns for the scores of billions of invested taxpayer dollars devoted each year.

After the Congress, John and I became friends and communicated often by e-mail and telephone. We occasionally did one another favors that I believe betokened our friendship. For example, when I was struggling to finish The Metabolic Treatment of Fibromyalgia, I was so stressed, exhausted, and mentally depleted that my health began to fail. A disturbing development was what seemed to be a lump in my throat. The "lump" was prominent and showed itself with every swallow. I became convinced that a cancerous tumor in my esophagus was probable. John generously spent time calming my apprehension. He explained that in England, he’d once worked as a physician in a clinic for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of the esophagus. While not discounting my concerns, he explained that the vast majority of patients evaluated at the clinic had stress-induced symptoms of the esophagus, and he speculated that the extreme stress I was under could very well have induced a persistent esophageal spasm that I was experiencing as a lump in my throat. He told me that the treatment that effectively relieved the symptoms for the vast majority of patients at the clinic had been stress-relieving psychological therapies. Just to be sure, however, my wife took me for evaluation at the radiological center where she often ordered imaging procedures. There, a radiologist found no evidence of a physical lesion in my esophagus. I then acted on John’s sage and patient counsel, and cured the "lump" in my throat through stress-relieving methods.

To illustrate how I felt about John over the years and still do, I’ll mention a favor I did for him in August of 1998. John was interested in starting a new journal. John’s friend Frank Lucatelli and Annamarie White, who had done technical writing for the Smithsonian, would also be taking part in publishing the journal. I suggested that John propose the new journal to a successful medical publisher I knew, Bill Cohen, and I wrote Bill a letter introducing John. Below are excerpts from the letter containing comments on some of John’s fine qualities.

Dear Bill: The purpose of this letter is to introduce you to Dr. John L. Gedye. He’ll be contacting you soon to propose a new journal. I suggested to him that I communicate with you beforehand in the way of an introduction. I wanted to do this because I find Dr. Gedye quite an extraordinary man, and I know that I’m not alone in this perception of him.

I mentioned to you a month ago in another letter that I’d taken part in the Houston Congress for Defining a New Paradigm for the Healing Arts. For a month before the actual Congress, extensive Internet communications took place between some of us who would attend and participate in the Congress. Dr. Gedye was the most prolific of those who participated in the pre-Congress Internet postings. In looking back over these postings (which were printed and handed out at the Congress), I’m most appreciative of the volume of his postings because of the high quality of the scholarly thoughts he expressed in them. I was very busy with other matters during the Internet communications, and early on, I didn’t read many of the postings. My wife (Dr. Gina Honeyman-Lowe), however, read most of them from the beginning. It was she who brought my attention to Dr. Gedye’s posts. She was most impressed by them and enthusiastically checked her e-mail each day to see if he’d written more. I took up the same practice after taking time to read all his posted communications.

When I went to the Congress in Houston, one of my main interests was to meet Dr. Gedye in person. I found him to be a refreshing combination of scientific astuteness and congeniality. He’s one of the precious few researchers I’ve met who is well versed in science philosophy and logic—intellectual tools that are requisite to effectively solving problems through research. I’ve learned that Dr. Gedye truly practices, whether through instinct or intellectual volition, what every great philosopher of science has declared: that when confronted with new ideas, we should clear our minds of judgments based on preconceived beliefs, welcome the ideas, accept them for scientific consideration, and reject them only if they don’t hold up to scrutiny by applied logic and empirical testing. I believe there’s a virtual absence of this practice among modern medical researchers. I also believe this absence is one of the fundamental obstacles to progress through medical research, and one of the reasons why the current medical paradigm shows distinct signs of crumbling. Dr. Gedye’s practice of this necessary step in truth-seeking and problem-solving makes him perfectly suited to head up the journal he’ll propose. In addition, his open-mindedness and congeniality have mustered support from like-minded individuals in diverse fields of health care and science. I’m confident that they, as I, will enthusiastically support the journal Dr. Gedye will propose.

My wife and I have had the privilege of spending time with Dr. Gedye. We’ve been very much impressed with the qualities we have seen in him. We’ve found him to be gracious, compassionate, tolerant of divergent views, highly literate, and an unusually stimulating conversationalist. As I said at the beginning of this letter, Dr. Gedye is quite an extraordinary man. I am confident that you’ll enjoy meeting and communicating with him.

In addition to gestures of friendship between John and me, I enjoyed a bountifully rewarding communicative relationship with him. For the most part, I queried him and listened and absorbed his opinions and views; I enriched myself at his expense. On the other hand, and to my delight, his extensively expressing himself in his eloquent, diplomatic British tongue was an activity to which he wasn’t particularly averse. Never have I known another human whose intellectual interests and inclinations so closely overlapped mine, and yet were so much more developed than mine that the relationship nourished my mind. My work had given me specialized knowledge in a field in which John wasn’t expert. Yet his greater breadth and depth of knowledge in the fields that undergird my scientific work left me feeling that the balance of benefits in our relationship was tipped in my favor in a way that I wasn’t equipped to rectify.

I’m so proud that John wrote the Foreword to my book The Metabolic Treatment of Fibromyalgia. In January of 2000, I recommended to the Board of Directors of the Fibromyalgia Research Foundation that John be appointed to the Board. I did so for several reasons: my admiration of his emotional commitment to humanitarian concerns, his exceptional knowledge of science and logic, and his expertise in the practicalities of research. The Board enthusiastically welcomed him, and he served as a Director until his death. John is now, and will remain, a posthumous member of our Board. In our upcoming studies, the absence of the conceptual and technical contributions he would have made will truly be sorely felt.

With John’s passing, one of my richest intellectual resources is gone. Now, at least for a while, I feel much like a sail hanging limp because the wind suddenly left it. Perhaps the impact of John’s death would be somewhat less had I not, only two months ago, lost my greatest literary inspiration with the death of my beloved nephew Brian Bain. Brian was a genuine, born genius of the English language. His presence in my life was a gift, not only because I loved him, felt pride in him, and had great joy because of him, but also because his prodigious, awe-inspiring use of the English language moved me to do my best, in my pedestrian way, at using that same language. In regard to science, logic, and compassion toward suffering humanity, John Gedye moved me in a similar way. Now, bereft of these rare human sources of inspiration, I must depend on my memories of them and their marvelous ability to inspire.

I read somewhere that we never really appreciate a resource until we’ve lost it. This generalization doesn’t apply to my appreciation of John Gedye. While he was here, I valued him greatly as part of my life, and I was well aware of how he enriched it. I wouldn’t change my full awareness of how special a man he was, although undoubtedly, it intensifies the sorrow I feel at his absence.

I’ve allowed myself a measure of self-indulgence in these comments, and now wish to place them into the proper context. They do, after all, have a purpose beyond my own catharsis. It has been said that those who’ve left us have but one chance at immortality. That chance lies in what they’ve left behind: our memory of them. The impact of a person’s life, the effect that life had on other people, their experience of the person—this is what remains. We honor John Gedye by remembering, and continuing to remember, how he affected us and why we’ll miss him so much.

Biography of Dr. John L. Gedye