Posted on 01/17/2005 8:04:02 AM PST by anniegetyourgun
There is no doubt. The treatment I receive does not coincidentally make me better eventually; it makes me feel better instantly. I am physically fit and active and in tune with my body. I exercise frequently but occasionaly tweak something. Sometimes stretching or ice/heat or a hot tub will work, sometimes it does not. When I seek chiropractic treatment, it works 99% of the time. If it does not work, my chiro has referred me to a PT (recently for Patellar tendinitis as an example) or to a doc if necessary. I speak not from blind faith, but experience. I am reluctant to admit I am a lawyer for fear of starting a different type of flame war. But I have no dog in this hunt.
From what experience do you speak?
Picture yourself falling forward as you're walking up the stairs. That's what happens when your feet don't move the way you want them to.
Spewing crap like that certainly confirms who is being an ass.
There is anecdotal evidence of all kinds on both sides of this issue.
My point is that for many thousands of people Chiropractic treatment is a logical alternative to the drugs and/or surgery that a doctor would prescribe.
You mention PT as an alternative, but usually PT is assigned for rehab, after surgery or medication or other treatment by a Doctor.
BTW, many PT services companies offer various types of "referral fees" to Doctors for sending PT or OT patients to their clinics. My guess would be if such referral fees were offered by Chiropractors many Doctors would have a different view of such treatments.
please see post #87. Such "referral fees" are as realistic a belief as the belief that straightening a back curvature actually treats any disease. It makes sense that he who has one belief also has the other.
And in reference to your prior post, you also have the belief that physicians seek to profit from a persons pain by drawing out their illness and doing many expensive tests; you believe that they have no interest in any modality that actually helps patients, if it detracts from their income. This is such a twisted view of reality that I realize that we have no common frame of reference from which to discuss the issue. I hope the Mother Ship comes for you soon.
The Medicare Fraud Statute prohibits "referral fees" or "kickbacks". NYS prohibits kickbacks to any practioner.
I know. But it's important for some people to BELIEVE that this is widespread practice. It fits in with their other belief systems. When they are THIS out of touch with reality, might as well abandon efforts to speak with them about it. It's like trying to convert a Kerry believer; it may be fun to present reality to them and laugh at their responses for a while, but after awhile you realize that it's pointless. "Kerry is a war hero"; "doctors prolong pain for profit"; what can you SAY to such a person?
You give yourself way too much credit. I am not a Chiropractor or in any related field. I just may be a tad frustrated at someone who adamantly refuses to give a shred of credit to, what I view as a reasonable alternative.
As far as Doctors go, I give them far more respect then you give to Chiropractors. BTW, in the Netherlands and possibly other European countries, ones first level of appointment when seeking medical care is with a "Nurse Practitioner" or(though they may term it something else. That person can then make several recomendations, such as:
see a Doctor (GP)
see a Specialist
write simple prescriptions
see a Chirpractor
and other possibilities
HL Mencken wrote-
CHIROPRACTIC
(from the Baltimore Evening Sun, December 1924)
This preposterous quackery flourishes lushly in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the oldtime family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even many chiropractic "hospitals." The morons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these "hospitals" copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by the pressure of misplaced vertebra upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord-in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.
Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an old quack named Andrew T. Still, the father of osteopathy. For years the osteopaths merchanted them and made money at the trade. But as they grew opulent they grew ambitious, ie., they began to study anatomy and physiology. The result was a gradual abandonment of Papa Still's ideas. The high-toned osteopath of today is a sort of eclectic. He tries anything that promises to work, from tonsillectomy to the X-rays. With four years' training behind him, he probably knows more anatomy than the average graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, or at all events, more osteology. Thus enlightened, he seldom has much to say about pinched nerves in the back. But as he abandoned the Still revelation it was seized by the chiropractors, led by another quack, one Palmer. This Palmer grabbed the pinched nerve nonsense and began teaching it to ambitious farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist preachers in a few, easy lessons. Today the backwoods swarm with chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough pressure on the rural politicians to get themselves licensed. Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits-retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school-say homeopathy-plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.
Such quackeries suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal. When these botched fall into the hands of competent medical men they are very likely to be patched up and turned loose upon the world, to beget their kind. But massaged along the backbone to cure their lues, they quickly pass into the last stages, and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them. What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers. That the labors of quacks tend to propagate epidemics and so menace the lives of all of us, as is alleged by their medical opponents-this I doubt. The fact is that most infectious diseases of any seriousness throw out such alarming symptoms and so quickly that no sane chiropractor is likely to monkey with them. Seeing his patient breaking out in pustules, or choking, or falling into a stupor, he takes to the woods at once, and leaves the business to the nearest medical man. His trade is mainly with ambulant patients; they must come to his studio for treatment. Most of them have lingering diseases; they tour all the neighborhood doctors before they reach him. His treatment, being nonsensical, is in accord with the divine plan. It is seldom, perhaps, that be actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps many a worthy soul from getting well.
The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competition serious and unpleasant. As I have said, it was their Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who invented all of the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that the lowly chiropractors now employ with such vast effect, and for years the osteopaths had a monopoly of them But when they began to grow scientific and ambitious their course of training was lengthened until it took in all sorts of tricks and dodges borrowed from the regular doctors, or resurrection men, including the plucking of tonsils, adenoids and appendices, the use of the stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of psychiatry. They now harry their students furiously and turn them out ready for anything from growing hair on a bald head to frying a patient with the x-rays. All this new striving, of course, quickly brought its inevitable penalties. The osteopathic graduate, having sweated so long, was no longer willing to take a case of delirium tremens for $2, and in consequence he lost patients. Worse, very few aspirants could make the long grade. The essence of osteopathy itself could be grasped by any lively farm-hand or night watchman in a few weeks, but the borrowed magic baffled him. Confronted by the phenomenon of gastrulation, or by the curious behavior of heart muscle, or by any of the current theories of immunity, he commonly took refuge, like his brother of the orthodox faculty, in a gulp of laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises altogether. Thus he was lost to osteopathic science, and the chiropractors took him in; nay, they welcomed him. He was their meat. Borrowing that primitive part of osteopathy which was comprehensible to the meanest understanding, they threw the rest overboard, at the same time denouncing it as a sorcery invented by the Medical Trust. Thus they gathered in the garage mechanics, ash-men and decayed welter-weights, and the land began to fill with their graduates. Now there is a chiropractor at every cross-roads.
I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make imbeciles immortal. If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney's spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven. And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by puffing its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later on. In such matters, I am convinced, the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of medical busybodies. If the latter gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of hangmen, policemen and other such legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether, and the present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear. I can't convince myself that that would work any good to the world. On the contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far -if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer oil goes through the mails Homo americanus is improved to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved.
But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect. It has superb potentialities, but only too often they are not converted into concrete cadavers. The hygienists rescue many of its foreordained customers, and, turning them over to agents of the Medical Trust, maintained at the public expense, get them cured. Moreover, chiropractic itself is not certainly fatal: even an Iowan with diabetes may survive its embraces. Yet worse, I have a suspicion that it sometimes actually cures. For all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems to know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of vagrom vertebrae upon the spinal nerves. And it may be true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be able to relieve that pressure. What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity. Let a thousand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine their backbones and deter mine what is the matter with them, and then let these diagnoses be checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine.
Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose maladies have been determined. My guess is that the chiropractors' errors in diagnosis will run to at least 95% and that their failures in treatment will push 99%. But I am willing to be convinced.
Where is such a committee to be found? I undertake to nominate it at ten minutes' notice. The land swarms with men competent in anatomy and pathology, and yet not engaged as doctors. There are thousands of hospitals, with endless clinical material. I offer to supply the committee with cigars and music during the test. I offer, further, to supply both the committee and the chiropractors with sound wet goods. I offer, finally, to give a bawdy banquet to the whole Medical Trust at the conclusion of the proceedings.
I'm just curious. What makes you such an expert on this subject?
You seem to be going hammer and tong with a lot of people on this issue.
Never mind that you use a blanket statement "All chiropractors are quacks" which is simply imflammatory rhetoric and not a logical statement.
As for my not presenting a logical argument, I've read your posts, and I'm not going to waste my time with that. There is nothing that could be said, no matter how logical, that would affect your thought process on this. You have your mind made up.
I just think you are dispensing an opinion about something you have absolutely no understanding of or experience with. Or maybe you do, but it is not all encompassing or comprehensive enough for you to make a statement like "All chiropractors are quacks."
But as the saying goes...everyone has opinions. You are certainly entitled to yours.
Hey I don't mind. Heck I borrowed it off someone else.
I am a lawyer. I am not a chiropractor. I have nothing personally vested in this argument.
I will ask you again because you did not answer my question the first time. From what experience do you speak? (In other words, are you a doctor, a physical therapist, etc.)
Physical Therapy is where I draw the line. I have watched my mother go through session after session of PT and it does absolutely nothing, nada. I think most therapists are in cahoots with the doctors and then find out that many of the PT's are actually funded by their referring Dr.
My daughter and I were in an accident and we went the PT route for months. Absolutely NO, and I mean NO relief from the pain. They kept giving reason after reason and tried all kinds of different things. At the time, I hated Chiropractic medicine and was totally against it, but we were desperate. After four sessions, we were up and running and only had maybe 3 visits each over the next six months. There are good ones out there and bad ones... just do your research.
How do you know there is no evidence? Are you aware that there are Chiro's that have been published in numerous Medical Journals?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.