“Replace pills with physical fitness,” was the message that Brig. Gen. (ret.) Rebecca Halstead brought to a recent conference in Las Vegas.

An energetic and beaming Halstead keynoted “From Their Point of View,” a post-combat conference for the National Guard and the Reserves at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Her major theme was change, and for her, it started at home.

A decade ago, Halstead was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a mysterious disorder that affects the joints and connective tissue, leaving its victims in chronic pain. It afflicts an estimated 12 million Americans, and some studies show it to be twice as prevalent among vets who have been deployed.

“Agonizing pain, debilitating fatigue, joint stiffness and sleep deprivation — you name it and I felt it,” says Halstead. “There I was in Iraq, responsible for over 20,000 military men and women, and I privately struggled to physically keep myself going.”

Halstead had been prescribed what she described as a brown paper lunch bag of medications, and she showed a slide of her medications. I counted 15 different pill bottles.

But when she got to Iraq in 2005-6 as the senior commanding general for logistics, she decided to quite taking the medications she had been prescribed shortly before her deployment. “If anyone challenged my decisions, I wanted them to challenge my rationale, not my clarity of mind,” she says.  “And then when I retired, I began to think that if they’ve prescribed all these drugs to me, what are they doing to my soldiers? This is a culture that has to change.”

All through her 27-year Army career, Halstead had exercised to keep in top physical shape. But after she returned from Iraq, she decided she needed to take better care of her body, so she sought out a good chiropractor.

“Chiropractic treatment helped improve my whole outlook on dealing with this chronic ailment,” she says. “The spinal adjustments along with the postural and nutritional advice I received helped to treat the fibromyalgia and allowed me to have many days with minimal pain — and most days without any medications. The care of a doctor of chiropractic was life changing for me.”

Vitamins and supplements to restore the minerals in her body helped restore her health, and she improved her diet. “I replaced junk food like potato chips with vegetables,” she says. “Imagine that!”

But it worked, and now the general’s new mission is to bring this simple message to the troops.

“If general officers become dependent on prescription drugs, you have to wonder how rampant it is among our junior officers,” she says. “We have better tools and coping skills, but no one is immune from this problem.”