The Keith Wassung Story

Have you met Keith Wassung? Keith went from being a weightlifting champion to being on deaths door in a very short time. Endless medication and specialists weren’t helping and he was ready for the end. Until he met a chiropractor who changed everything. We really hope you read Keith’s story and look up his work. We know his message can save more lives and continue to bring people back to health!

“In 1986, I was on top of the world. I had just won the All Navy Weightlifting Championships and set a national drug-free record in the bench press. My full-time job became lifting weights and competing, and I loved it. I attended college at night and did a number of exhibitions and talks in the community. I had minor celebrity status both in the Naval community and in my city. Life was good.

Shortly after returning from a competition tour, I began to experience some sinus headaches, and my training started to plateau. I had kept a training journal since I started lifting in 1978, tracking my progress very carefully. The headaches weren’t bad, just annoying. I went to the Navy dispensary and was given some medications. The meds worked like magic, except they gave me nuclear diarrhea. I went back to the doctor and was given drugs to stop that. The diarrhea went away, but then I experienced severe dehydration and was admitted to the hospital. After many tests, I walked out with three more prescriptions.

My health rapidly began to spiral downward, and soon I was spending my days at the hospital, going from one doctor to the next. Within a month, I was taking 18 drugs a day, which amounted to about 80 individual pills. I quickly became homebound and disabled, unable to work, drive a car, or really do much of anything.

The only food I could keep down was applesauce and sometimes apple cobbler. Most nights, I would get a blanket and a pillow and sleep with the pillow on the toilet because of the dry heaving.

The heaves would begin around 1 a.m. and last until sunrise. On good nights, the heaves were four minutes apart; on bad nights, they were two minutes apart. I went from a solid 220 lbs to around 165. I looked like death warmed over. This went on for over a year, and most of it is still a blur. I had to have someone drive me anytime I needed to see the doctor. Fortunately, I had good friends who helped in this regard.

I saw all kinds of doctors and was even seen by one of President Reagan's doctors at Bethesda. No one really had an answer for what was going on, except that my immune system was failing. Diagnoses of Epstein-Barr and severe chronic fatigue syndrome were discussed as possibilities.

I had a meeting with the head of the Naval Hospital in Charleston in the summer of 1987. I was brought into his office, and he told me to get my affairs in order because he felt I only had a few months to live. The news was actually a relief. I wanted to die and end the misery. I had a friend drive me to a mall later that week to buy gifts for my family for the following Christmas, knowing I was probably not going to be alive.

While in a B. Dalton bookstore, a man asked if I was okay (I could only walk maybe 15-20 steps before I had to stop and rest). I said I was fine because I had gotten tired of telling everyone the story. This guy persisted a bit, and he told me he was a doctor and that maybe he could help me. I told him I had seen some of the best doctors in the world, and then he told me he was a chiropractor. I think I laughed for the first time in over a year.

I told him I had internal health problems, not neck and back pain, which was the limit of my understanding of chiropractic care. He persisted that I come to his clinic, and about this time, my friend offered to drive me there the next day. I agreed, but with absolutely no intention of going to this quack's office. On the drive home, my friend said something like, "Well, you should give it a shot. What do you have to lose?" I reluctantly agreed to go.

The next day, I went to the office and went through the whole new patient process. The doctor brought me into the exam room and began his examination. I was as skeptical as anyone could be, when suddenly, he said, "Hey Keith, did you have a bed-wetting problem as a kid?"

Wow... how in the world did he know that? I had a classic case of bed-wetting for most of my childhood, four to five nights a week. I never spent the night with friends, and I finally grew out of it by the time I was 15 or 16. My parents spent all kinds of money on therapies and treatments. But how could this quack have known about that?

He explained that he could tell from examining my lumbar spine and talked about how the bladder and nerves are connected. He now had my attention! If he pulled that one out of his butt, it was a good one.

The chiropractor adjusted me on the first day and sent me home with instructions to return. I woke up the next morning with a stiff and sore neck; actually, my entire back was sore. It wasn’t severe pain, but I was definitely sore. I thought to myself, "This guy is a fraud. He hurt me yesterday, and today he’s supposed to fix me? No more chiropractic visits for me."

I shaved, showered, and got dressed. As I was walking down the hall to the kitchen, I was hit with a ton of bricks. I had just slept through the entire night for the first time in about 15 months. I had just showered, shaved, dressed, and I wasn’t wiped out with fatigue. I even felt a bit hungry! I made some scrambled eggs (which I love but hadn’t been able to eat in over a year) and sat down on the couch, waiting for breakfast to come back up. It never did.

I continued getting adjusted and flushed the meds within the first week. It wasn’t a short-term miracle, but each day I got a bit stronger and could do more things. It was a huge victory just to be able to walk to the mailbox and get the mail. Within two weeks, I was driving again. Within two months, I was back in the gym training, and I ended up far surpassing my previous lifts. But I still couldn’t figure out what chiropractic had done for me. I would ask the chiropractor, and he gave me a vague answer.

I started going to chiropractic orientations at other offices, hoping to figure it all out, but I was disappointed. All the orientations were spinal hygiene classes: how to lift properly, bend your knees, drink water, etc. I couldn’t find much at the library or on periodical microfiches either. Most of what I read suggested that chiropractic was somewhat effective for neck and back pain, and that was it.

Finally, the chiropractor gave me some old, musty-smelling books with a weird green color to them. He told me I might find my answers in them, but he had never actually read them. The first volume was Bigness of the Fellow Within by B.J. Palmer. I remember reading it and thinking, "This guy is really out in left field." But the more I read, the more sense it made. I started going to the medical library in Charleston, reading volumes of anatomy and physiology books like Guyton’s and Harrison’s. I began to see this incredible congruence between how the body actually works and Palmer’s writings.

Eventually, it clicked in my brain, and I retired from competitive lifting to focus on communicating the chiropractic message. I don’t always like sharing the message, but I don’t feel like I have the right not to. If someone rejects the message, that’s fine with me. At that point, they’re no longer my responsibility, and I can move on.

I don’t play golf or softball. My free time is spent sharing the chiropractic message. I do between 250 and 300 talks each year about chiropractic and plan on doing so as long as I’m on this earth. I owe that much to the chiropractic profession.”