Born and raised in Canada, Faye attended Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in Toronto and first practiced in rural Ontario. He was among the first faculty at the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic in England and later moved to the United States, where he has practiced for many years in Los Angeles. Dr. Faye recently joined the faculty at Cleveland Chiropractic College – Los Angeles, where he teaches a series of technique courses.

Dr. Faye’s website, www.chiropracticmentor.com, offers video presentations of his palpation and adjusting methods.

What was your first experience with chiropractic care?

When I was 17 years old, I contracted rheumatic fever and this put me in bed. All my joints were swollen and I was in excruciating pain. My dad had to build a wooden frame to keep the sheets off me, because even the weight of the sheets and cover were too painful for my joints to withstand that pressure. As you know, we don’t get rheumatic fever any more in our society because penicillin kills the streptococcal infections that give you the immune response and give you polyarthritis. I was on aspirin (three every four hours) for two and a half months, which caused me a tremendous amount of digestive problems. During that time, I never put my foot on the floor. Finally, my dad said, “You’re just getting weaker and weaker. Let’s get a chiropractor in here and see what happens.” At the time, medical doctors were telling parents that 42 percent of kids with rheumatic fever died and 75 percent of those that survived had serious heart trouble.

So Dr. Murphy came with a portable table and put it beside the bed. He and my dad lifted me onto the table and he did an adjustment in my mid- to upper thoracics. There were huge audible releases, multiple audible releases, in the upper thoracic region. Then they lifted me back into bed and away he went. The next morning when I woke up, probably 50 percent of my joint swelling was gone. I was able to get up out of bed, go to the toilet and have a bath. It was quite a dramatic change. I had this sense that I was going to heal and get better. My fever broke and in about two to three weeks, when they re-did my sed rate [erythrocyte sedimentation rate is a marker for inflammation], it had dropped from the high 40s (0-10 being normal) to something like two or three. After that, I made a steady recovery and had a few more adjustments with Dr. Murphy and was able to go back to high school in the fall.

And this led to a major change in your career plans.

Yes. At that time, I was training to go to the university to become a chemical engineer. I was specializing in math, chemistry, physics, and all the sciences. When I had this experience, I decided that I was going to become a chiropractor so I could help other people experience such a dramatic change in their health. I ended up fully fit again, no heart trouble. Everything was fine.

Looking back on that now, what do you think would be the most reasonable explanation for your dramatic response to chiropractic, and the influence of the adjustments on this diffuse and severe joint inflammation?

It’s an interesting thing. In four years at chiropractic college, I never did find out why I responded like that. None of the explanations were satisfactory. And then, upon graduation I was very fortunate that in starting to study and research, in my reading I came across the work of Hans Selye, his book, Physiology of Stress. If you read Selye, you’ll recognize that all immune and autoimmune responses are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, which can cause the hypothalamus, the adrenals, etc., to produce pro-inflammatory hormones. Now a hormone can go to every joint and make every joint swell. Examples are the prostaglandins, the kinines and other inflammatory mediators.