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THE OTHER HALF: THE PERFECT TOUCH
Chiropractor Peter Roy and GL's Beth Chamberlin rub each other the right way.
by Valerie Davison
Soap Opera Weekly
August 17, 1999

At first, Peter Roy wasn't too eager to meet Beth Chamberlin (Beth Raines, Guiding Light). It was 1989, and Roy was attending the National Chiropractic College in Lombard, Ill., when a fellow student told him about her. "She had gone to high school with Beth in Vermont," he says, "and she kept telling me I should meet her friend who was on this TV show. I was like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' Then one day I came in, saw Beth on television, and said, 'Whoa. You've got to introduce me to this girl.' " Three years later, Chamberlin and Roy met at the friend's home in Vermont during Christmas vacation, and by August he had closed his practice and relocated to Los Angeles to be with her -- testimony, he asserts, to courtship by telephone. "We learned to communicate with each other and we learned to listen, which serves us well."

Life in California didn't fare as well, however. When the Northridge earthquake hit at 4:30 a.m. in January 1994, the two were living about five miles from the epicenter. "The greatest terror was the aftershocks," he says, "and wondering if the next one was going to be the 'big one.' After about 30 days and 3,000 aftershocks, Beth looked at me and said, 'I don't want to stay here anymore,' and I said, 'Thank god you said that. Let's get out of here.' " They were married 11 months later in her Vermont hometown, and he renewed his practice in New York's Hudson Valley.

When Roy was 18, he injured his back playing soccer, and when it didn't improve, his mother took him to a local chiropractor. "It was an epiphany," he remembers. "When I felt that first relief from the adjustment, I knew this was the way health care should be. I've never been one to put chemicals into myself." But Roy didn't set out to be a chiropractor. In fact, he didn't know exactly what he wanted to do. After obtaining a marketing degree from the University of South Carolina, he spent several years as a salesman, first selling copiers for Xerox, then selling medical and surgical supplies for a pharmaceutical company. "I was very interested in the sciences, but I didn't think I could handle med school or any kind of professional school. I didn't become a chiropractor until I was 29."

Roy's Rockland County, N.Y., clientele includes what you might expect -- athletes, the elderly, office workers with carpal tunnel syndrome -- and a fair number of children. "Oftentimes, the first spinal injury is at birth," he says, "which requires significant force on an incompletely formed spine to exit the baby from the womb." One of his most gratifying experiences was with a 2-month-old girl who was unable to raise her head off her right shoulder. A pediatric orthopedist had already told the mother she might eventually need surgery. "I just checked her neck," Roy says, "and found the problem. The muscle was spastic, and literally with the lightest touch of two thumbs, it corrected and she picked her head up, right in front of my eyes."

Stories like this have inspired some grateful patients to view chiropractors as omnipotent, and medical doctors to chide them for claiming to cure anything and everything. "Very often, we see people who are at their last resort, so the results we have can seem miraculous to them. And chiropractic works on things you'd never expect, like asthma, allergies, headaches, and children with colic and ear infections. But we can't prevent or cure everything, and where chiropractic is not indicated, we refer to other, very able practitioners, because it's in the best interest of the patient."

While it has been around as a system of therapy for thousands of years (Hippocrates manipulated the spine), chiropractic has only been an established profession in this country for a little more than a century. "There was a time when chiropractors were actually put in jail for practicing medicine without a license," Roy points out, with some emotion, "so I try very hard to be open and inclusive of all healing techniques. At the same time, we don't want to be vulnerable to charlatans, either. For the record, every aspect of health care we see now in our society really has its place, but my real belief is that technical expertise is not the most important aspect of healing. The most important aspects of healing are compassion, humor and the ability to listen. That's what people want. And most doctors will tell you that we don't heal. God and nature heal. We just do what we can to facilitate it."

Roy also does whatever he can to take care of his wife. An early riser by nature (which she is not), he makes her breakfast on days she has an early call, and enjoys accompanying her to industry events. "I'm happily anonymous," he says casually of these functions. "I'm there to support Beth, and if my job is to get her a drink or get her something else, that's what I do, and I love doing it. Nobody is better than me at being Beth's husband. It's the best job in the world, and I'll never give it up." #