Testimonials
Advocating for CFS Disability
I became a patient of Dr. Cheney really out of desperation. Going to Dr. Cheney was necessitated when my disability was pulled by my carrier.
He is to my knowledge to only doctor in the country that was qualified to look at an individual in this situation and write up the truth in such a manner that insurance companies could not dispute it and take away the benefits of a CFS patient.
He wrote up what was really wrong with me, and when he submitted it, the insurance carrier hired a doctor who disputed his findings. He then wrote back an absolutely unbelievable letter using the term “egregious statements” and tore them up one side and down the other.
They were left with no choice but to reinstate my disability, and have never challenged me since.
D.L, Georgetown, TX, USA
That’s another blessing with Dr. Cheney, that he knows the disability system so well after dealing with so many disabled patients. He knows the system, he knows the language that’s required, and he knows what tests work.
If you are disabled he can document it, and he’s willing to go through the bureaucracy and the paperwork and fight it. My disability carrier wanted to put me on antidepressants. but my lawyer and Dr. Cheney said, No way.
My insurance company at one point dropped me. They cut off my benefits. That’s when I got a lawyer. And boy, did Dr. Cheney write some good letters for me.
His letters are always professional. They’re always effective. But after the insurance company dropped me without cause, there was a tone and an edge to his letters that pleased me very much. I knew I had an advocate.
He was still professional, but he let them know that what they were doing was inappropriate and they could not get away with it.
A friend of mine said Dr. Cheney kicks butt when it comes to insurance companies!
S.S., Dallas, TX, USA
Managing Treatment Cost
People will ask me, Should I see Dr. Cheney? I don’t know if I can afford it. I tell them it’ll be the best money you ever spent.
Yes, it is going to be a lot of money. But five years from now, you’re going to look at the money you spent going from doctor to doctor to massage therapist to chiropractor, back to another doctor, to an acupuncturist…and it would be less.
Five years from now, the money you will have spent on your healthcare for CFS will be far more than you would have spent going to Dr. Cheney, and you could have gotten much better results with him.
The initial visits are where most of the money is, but the follow-up visits can be done in four to five hours. And it’s once a year. I often tell people, remember that this is what you are spending for a whole year of care.
S.S., Dallas, TX, USA
The first visit is expensive. You spend eight or nine hours, but that eight or nine hours can keep you out of the doctor’s office back home. And in the long run, his charges per hour are comparable to what any physician would charge if they sat down with you for the same amount of time.
Other physicians charge $100, $150 for five to ten minutes of their time. So his charges are not that expensive. It seems like they’re expensive, but over the long run they’re not, because it keeps me out of the doctors’ offices back home, which turns out to be cheaper.
Plus you feel better. If doctors here at home were in charge, I wouldn’t be getting better. I’d be getting worse.
D.R., Tallahassee, FL, USA
Offering Understanding to the CFS Community
The first visit to him is a strange paradox. You walk away from it going, Oh my goodness, I’m sick. The doctors were telling me I might be crazy and I just needed to take an antidepressant, but I’m really sick. And he knows why you’re sick, and he explains it, and you walk away feeling very, very validated.
I’m not crazy. I’m not insane. I’m not malingering. I’m really, really sick. There’s something very powerful about that.
I call it a paradoxical experience because not only do you come away with the knowledge of “I’m very sick,” you come away feeling incredibly hopeful. Because Dr. Cheney is talking about what’s on the horizon, what he’s researching, what other people are researching.
I feel like he has the best shot of anyone at making us well. At making us functional. I feel like he will have more success with that than anyone else
You come away primarily with hope. I come away with so much hope from a visit with him.
S.S., Dallas, TX, USA
What I have found is that very few doctors truly believe that this is a disease. When you’re ill and you’re not being believed, you’re kind of like a rape victim who’s not being believed. Your healing can’t start until you’re believed, because you can’t be treated when your own doctor does not believe you need treatment.
I hear the same thing from other people who went to the big clinics. You felt like you were a robot being pushed through different things, and when they don’t find anything wrong with you, they don’t like to deal with something hard.
Often there’s not even a doctor there that treats CFS. They just think that maybe you’re stressed, or too Type A, or something like that.
Dr. Cheney is totally different. He looks at the whole picture. He looks at what’s causing these unusual symptoms and doesn’t just pick apart each symptom by itself. You’re not going to get a full understanding of the disease if you don’t look at the whole picture. He can do that when so many other doctors can’t.
C.E., Columbus, OH, USA
Doctors who didn’t know about this disease would have put me on medications that would have worsened the CFS. My GP here wanted me to go on blood pressure medicine, and I told him that I would not go on that medicine unless Dr. Cheney OK’d it.
I called Dr. Cheney, and he told me I didn’t have high blood pressure. I didn’t go on the medicine.
Dr. Cheney was right and my doctor was wrong. I didn’t have high blood pressure.
Instead of helping me they would have made me worse. They probably would have killed me, actually. They don’t have the expertise to treat me.
My doctor now tells me that Dr. Cheney’s calling the shots. He’s totally come around. He says I need to keep doing what Dr. Cheney told me to do. And I have the premier internal specialist in my city.
Dr. Cheney listens to his patients. No matter how bizarre the symptom may be, he listens to you, and he is able to tell you why you feel that way.
D.R., Tallahassee, FL, USA
The Cheney Clinic Staff
Dr. Cheney’s nurse Dixie is the kindest, sweetest, dearest most patient human being. She’s just wonderful.
They’re always wonderful at the clinic. They’re never short with you. They never act like they’re too busy to talk to you. The whole staff is just wonderful.
D.R., Tallahassee, FL, USA
Dixie is our primary interface with Dr. Cheney. I love her! I feel like she’s our counselor, like she’s our mother, like she’s our best friend.
I know that most of the time when I talk to her, she has a very heavy workload, and yet she always makes you feel like she has all the time in the world to talk to you. She’s warm, friendly and helpful.
Dr. Cheney is a good and gentle soul. He’s not egotistical at all. He forgot to take the class on having a god complex. He doesn’t have the ego issues that a lot of doctors do, he loves learning from his patients.
His staff is a joy, he’s a joy. I just can’t say enough about him. I just cannot recommend them all highly enough.
S.S., Dallas, TX, USA
What Makes Our Clinic Different?
I believe and my family and friends believe that if it wasn’t for Dr. Cheney, I wouldn’t be alive. To me he is a genius, an absolute genius. I would put his knowledge of the human immune system and how cellular energy works up there with anybody in the world.
He can explain to me what’s going on inside my body so that I have a good understanding of what’s happening to me. No other doctor I know does that.
It makes me feel absolutely joyous to be treated by a doctor with his level of expertise. I feel great joy to be treated like a human being who has a brain and can understand.
If something changes in CFS treatment, we have access to it almost immediately. We don’t have to wait for it to filter through other doctors. We get it right now.
We’re the first ones to get new ways of being helped. I feel like I’m at the cutting edge of research regarding my condition, absolutely.
D.R., Tallahassee, FL, USA
Dr. Cheney is the best-informed doctor that I’ve ever come across for this illness.
C.E., Columbus, OH, USA
Dr. Cheney is the most brilliant man I have ever met, and probably the most knowledgeable doctor treating CFS. He’s this unique threefold combination that I’ve never encountered elsewhere, and I know quite a bit about other CFS specialists.
He’s a phenomenal clinician, a fantastic researcher, and has a passionate love for teaching and educating his patients. Clinician, researcher and teacher — you get all three with Dr. Cheney.
His training is different than other doctors because his first advanced degrees were in physics. He learned a different way of thinking, and it has served us well.
I’ve heard from other doctors that his instructors in medical school said he had a different way of approaching things. He can make connections that other people can’t make, and he can come up with solutions that other people could never think of.
With the results that Dr. Cheney is getting now, he’s the best hope for the CFS community. I think he’s on to the path that’s going to lead to the greatest recovery for the greatest number of patients.
He’s just the most brilliant man. He’s so passionate. He’s so dedicated. He’s dedicated his life to helping us.
I’ve never met anyone so passionate about what they’re doing, not in this field, not in CFS.
S.S., Dallas, TX, USA
Dr. Cheney has devoted the last 25 years of his professional life to this illness in all its variations, versus someone who is either shooting from the hip or new at it, and that’s a big difference.
Most of the doctors I went to before would try whatever they heard about out on you, or would take their favorite treatment and try it out on you. I’ve seen lots of doctors before, but I don’t think anyone ever took as thorough a history, or made as much sense of it, or knew as much about biology and biochemistry, or could integrate all that information like Dr. Cheney can.
K.A., Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Working with International Patients
Dr. Cheney’s the only overseas physician I’d be interested in. I’ve wasted so much money on ineffective medication and treatments that only made me worse.
I’ve been reading about him ever since I was first on the internet, in the ‘90s. If I saw anything about Dr. Cheney, I’d read it. I’d been watching and reading with great interest, thinking, this makes sense! This describes exactly what happened to me.
If I’d been well, I would have been tramping all over this earth anyway. I would be having a trip every year. So I thought, why don’t I try Dr. Cheney?
I rang up thinking, this’ll be a year’s wait just to get in. But I got on the waiting list.
They had a cancellation, and they said, can you be here in four weeks? And me with no current passport or anything, and I hadn’t traveled in years! But I got myself over there, and I haven’t regretted it.
I loved Asheville. I’m from the coast and I love the beach, but the mountains are my next best place to be. I never thought I’d visit the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I loved Asheville.
I drove the Blue Ridge Parkway {LINK!} and thought, this is fantastic! This is a bonus. And the elevation seems to take some of the edge off my symptoms.
The exchange rates (between the U.S. and Australia) can be difficult. The clinic is very good at helping people with that. When an exchange rate problem hit in 2008, I rang up and said, I’ve got a problem, and could we change my appointment to a budget appointment?
They were very cooperative. They cut the visit time down in size, and minimized the number of tests.
The biggest barrier to me is the length of the flight. I just thought, well, you’ve got to go.
I book a wheelchair for the airport. And I tend to go a week or so early. It’s easier to travel mid-week because I’ve got a good chance of getting a business class upgrade. Business class just takes so much of the stress out of the trip.
I fax or email the clinic as much as I can. The one time I had a phone consult with Dr. Cheney, he called me early in the morning, his time. The time difference hasn’t been a problem.
The Australian doctors really haven’t got with it at all, in my experience. I’ve been talking to people in Australia, and other people have gone to the clinic as a result of my recommendation.
The sooner you can get there, the better. I’ve said to people I’ve come across, GO! There’s nothing in Australia that compares.
J.R., Melbourne, Australia