An Interview with Dr. Mary Ann Block of the Block Center: Be Your Own Health Care Advocate

Plaid for Women Interview
Dr. Mary Ann Block
Founder, The Block Center

Dr. Block, tell us why you went to medical school.

I went to medical school at age 39 to protect my family. After doctors made my daughter ill with prescription drugs and couldn’t get her well again, I realized I needed to know what doctors knew to keep that from happening again.

Your mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and doctors told you she had just a short time to live. What was your response?

When MD Anderson told us that my mother had only two months to live, I uncovered every alternative treatment I could find. Using an integrative approach of chemo and radiation, along with Nutritional IV’s, hypnosis, visualization, magnesium injections, special diet and much more, my mother was cured from an incurable disease in only four months.

How long after that diagnosis did your mother live?

My mother lived 18 more years, dying at age 92 and she never had cancer again.

You specialize in ADHD, Depression and Autism. Tell us why you chose to focus on those areas of healthcare?

After my daughter recovered, I realized that what happened to her was happening to millions of children. Doctors were prescribing drugs with serious side effects, unnecessarily, and these conditions had real underlying medical problems that could be treated successfully without giving someone a psychiatric label and a psychiatric drug.

You believe that many diagnosed “mental illnesses” are actually the result of reactions caused by underlying medical problems or diet. Tell us about that.

Feeling depressed, does not mean you have a psychiatric disorder, Depression, just as feeling anxious does not mean you have a psychiatric disorder, Anxiety. Instead of being so quick to give out psychiatric labels and drugs, if doctors would take the time to find the underlying medical cause of these symptoms, people could actually recover and not be dependent on the drugs. Through 25 years of practicing medicine, I have consistently found that there are always real, underlying medical or educational causes of so-called “mental illness” disorders.

What do you think the state of today’s healthcare is in?

I think the US medical system is in bad shape. The pharmaceutical industry controls our health. The drug companies can charge whatever they want for the drugs they sell. The drug companies control the FDA in that the more they pay, the faster they can get a drug approved. Also, drug companies now do much of their so-called research in third world countries with little, if any oversight. They do not have to report negative results. So if a drug they are testing kills 200 people, they don’t have to share than information with the FDA.

How important is it that patients’ be their own healthcare advocates?

I tell my patients that it is extremely important for them to be their own health advocates. If a doctor prescribes a drug that causes damage, that doctor can sleep just fine that night, but the patient could live the results for the rest of their lives. I tell them to read the drug insert on any drug they are thinking of taking. Chances are, their doctor didn’t read it. If there is a side effect of a prescribed drug that someone is concerned about, they should find one that doesn’t have that side effect or find another way to treat their problem.

You and a business partner have invented a device that involves a specially designed chair that could revolutionize the way patients with Dementia, Traumatic Brain Injury, ADHD and Autism etc. are treated. Tell us about this.

We developed a product called The SAVE Program. SAVE stands for Sensory-motor, Auditory, Visual Education. It is a brain-retraining program that works in only five days to help improve or eliminate the symptoms we often call Autism, ADHD, Dementia and Traumatic Brain Injury. We have seen those with memory loss regain their memory. We have seen those on the Autism Spectrum begin to speak or rejoin the world around them. A young woman with complete memory loss from drug side effects, regained her memory in only three days. Kids diagnosed with ADHD have been able to focus, concentrate and listen better and those with Traumatic Brain Injury have seen good improvement in their symptoms too.