OPINION

Chuck Carlson column: New product brings Monarch relief

Chuck Carlson
Battle Creek Enquirer

Note: This column originally appeared December 2014.

Dawn Monarch touched her face and smiled.

A few weeks ago, she could do neither.

"And look at this," she said Friday, as she proceeded to run halfway down a hall and back again.

She smiled again.

"I could never have done that," she said. "It's just unbelievable."

If this is supposed to be the season for all things wonderful, perhaps it's not too much to say that this is the season for unbelievable, too.

It surely is for Monarch, the 59-year-old woman who came into the Enquirer offices a few weeks ago convinced that the only option left to her in a life that had grown unbearable was to kill herself.

She suffers from trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve disease she said she developed more than 20 years ago after dental surgery.

The years since have been an unending wave of pain and unhappiness and desperation. She said she has been through more painkillers than she can count and while some work for a while, it never lasts, and the pain roared back worse than ever.

She couldn't eat and she couldn't sleep and weather extremes were excruciating.

In early November, when she came in to talk, she said she had reached the end of her rope. She was running out of pain meds and could get no more.

She wanted someone to listen, someone to help, someone to tell her it would be OK.

Otherwise, she only saw suicide as her last option, because she said she could not live with the pain anymore.

Her story drew a lot of reaction from readers, who offered medical options, prayers, acupuncture, surgery and sympathy.

And one man emailed from Menlo Park, Calif., offering something different.

Larry Bernstein is a Harvard- and Stanford-educated researcher who had developed a skin cream called Gallixa that he said had shown promising results for people with chronic pain, including trigeminal neuralgia.

Would she like to try it?

Dawn had his information when, two weeks ago, the pain again drove her to the brink.

Out of desperation, Dawn contacted Bernstein and he mailed her a complimentary 1.2-ounce jar.

"An hour after I started using it, I could touch my face," Dawn said. "It was amazing. I used a wash cloth on my face and I haven't been able to do that in years."

Monarch has called it a miracle. Bernstein is a little more circumspect, but clearly pleased.

"I talked to her (Wednesday)," Bernstein said. "She couldn't stop thanking me. I don't think it's a miracle but many, many people with her condition have said it's helped them, and quickly — within an hour. They say they got relief for the first time in years, sometimes decades. It's taken me years to believe my own product works."

Bernstein said the active ingredient in Gallixa is a metal, gallium maltolate, that has been shown to reduce inflammation.

He said he originally developed it several years ago as a possible cancer treatment.

"The compound did get into clinical trials and we demonstrated it is very safe even at high doses," he said. "But for various business reasons, the money ran out and the trials never got any further. During the research, we also found it was a very good anti-inflammatory. We tested it on animals and it was promising."

He mixed up a compound for the 100-year-old mother of a friend who had similar face pain to Monarch's and who also was considering suicide.

"Out of desperation, I mixed up some of this gallium maltolate into a cream," he said. "I said, 'I don't know if it will work but it can't hurt.' In an hour the pain was almost gone. She went on to live to 106."

He said he was skeptical of the results and wrote it off as coincidence. But as more people tried it with good results, he began to think it might be something special.

Bernstein is quick to say that Gallixa has gone through no Food and Drug Administration testing and cannot be promoted as a drug, only as a cosmetic.

But he says he's helped several hundred people and has sold more than 1,500 tubes and jars of Gallixa, most with good results, he said.

And Dawn Monarch is counting herself among the true believers.

There is still a stinging pain in her mouth that makes it difficult to swallow, but she said she can work through that because, for the first time in years, she can fight her disease on something approaching even ground.

"Now I have options and I'm going to use them," she said.

As for Bernstein, he plans to continue offering his product to those who need it and, perhaps, he'll get the FDA trials that could open a whole new realm for him.

"I don't have credibility," he said. "The people who use it have the credibility. My interest is to see people benefit."

Need more information?

A 1.2-ounce jar of Gallixa is $24.95 and a two-ounce tube is $37.95.

For more information about Gallixa, go to the following websites:

http://www.gallixa.com/GAMReferences/BernsteinPainMedicine2012.pdf

http://www.gallixa.com/GAMReferences/IASP_Poster2014.pdf

http://www.gallixa.com/AboutGallixa.html

http://www.gallixa.com/Endorsements.html