[gas_dr]

This stuff is true and real. The chiropractors cannot perscribe drugs, and will tell you they can cure everything that ails you with manipulation.

I am proud to be a physician (anesthesiologist) with a stron background in internal medicine. One day at the Minnesota State Fair last September, I went to the exhibition hall where there was a chiropractor booth. The propaganda said free chiropractic evaluation, will help cure disease.

Here is the scary part -- remember that I CAN READ XRay (although I did not tell him that). He shot a back film, told me that my back was entirely out of alignment and that I would need extensive chiropractic manipulation. He also said that I am on a lot of medications that should be stopped for vitamins. I am on NO medicines, and I looked at the xray -- and there was NO misalignments...

Remember -- these are the people that stop perscriptions, which IMHO probably kills many more people than vertebral artery disruption.

Finally, the vertebral artery supplies the lower brain, stroke of this artery can produce lock in syndrome where the upper brain is fine (Thought, emotion) but motor movements, including speaking, is gone...

Chriporactors need to be taken out of medicine.

[pt17]

Chriporactors need to be taken out of medicine.

Apparently so do some "expert" medical doctors, none of whom could do anything more for my back pain than extract money from my wallet. One of those chiropractors, who you want taken out, fixed the problem in two visits for not a whole lot of money. I would agree that there are some number of chiropractors who scam people, but then again, the are certainly some doctors doing the same thing (i.e., I am going to charge you big dollars for not being able to fix you.)

[Sir Gawain]

Chriporactors need to be taken out of medicine.

And I've read stories about surgeons leaving scapels and other things inside a patient. I guess that means doctors should be taken out of medicine too.

[Old Professer]

Wow, you must be on some really stron perscriptions; I don't blame you for staying away from those chriporactors -- seriously, did you spell this way while you were in school?

[chiromommy]

A few statistics to add a little perspective to the discussion:

Risk of death in fatal air crash, flying three
hours on a U.S. commercial airline: 1 in 2,000,000

Risk of death in motor vehicle accident, driving
35 miles: 1 in 2,000,000

Risk of being injured in motor vehicle accident,
driving ½ mile: 1 in 2,000,000

Risk of serious stroke or neurological
complication resulting from a chiropractic neck
adjustment: 1 in 2,000,000 treatments

Risk of death, per year, from GI bleeding due
to NSAID use for osteoarthritis and related
conditions: 800 in 2,000,000

Overall Mortality rate for spinal surgery: 7 in 10,000

Death rate from cervical spine surgery: 4-10 in 10,000

Rate of serious or life-threatening
complications from spinal stenosis surgery: 5 in 100

Risk of a developing a gastric ulcer visible on
endoscopic examination after 1 week’s
treatment with naproxen (at 500mg twice daily): 19 in 100
(380,000 in 2,000,000)


When placed in the context of other "risks," chiropractic care is actually much safer than a lot of commonly accepted procedures. The medical literature contains numerous reports of similar arterial dissections resulting from common medical procedures such as administering anesthesia during surgery, extending the neck during dental procedures or taking X-rays, or from normal activities such as talking on the telephone, swimming, yoga, stargazing, overhead work, or during sleep. “Beauty Parlor Stroke,” caused by extending the neck over a sink while washing the hair, is well-documented, but nobody is calling for an end to the hairdressers' right to wash hair. People fear what they don't understand and those who stand to gain from this fearmongering continue to do a great job of misinforming the public with half-truths and flawed research.

When considering the "safety" of modern medicine versus chiropractic, take a look at malpractice insurance rates. Chiropractic malpractice insurance is a fraction of that of medical doctors, and we all know that insurance companies are all about risk management. If we are the stroke-causing quacks you would have the public believe, why are researchers from Duke University and other reputable healthcare institutions supporting the safety and efficacy of chiropractic care to treat a variety of conditions?

Yes, we are different, and happily so. We do not want to be part of medicine, so there's no need for chiropractors "to be taken out of medicine". Our paradigm is different, part of wellness and prevention, not sickness and disease. We believe that healing comes from Above, Down (from our Creator, not a crystal or dreamcatcher!) and from within the patient (the body knows how to heal itself), not from the outside (through drugs and surgery). Chiropractors seek to correct minor misalignments of the bony skeleton to allow optimum function of the nervous system. What is the primary purpose of the skull and vertebral column? To protect the brain and spinal cord, the core of the master system, the nervous system. Chiropractic is about increased function and empowering the patient to take charge of their own health, not about taking money away from the orthopedic surgeons!

You specifically mentioned x-ray, so I'd like to clarify a couple of things. In the practice of chiropractic, x-ray is used with various protocols of marking and measuring the films to locate very small misalignments, in order to correlate the findings of the physical examination (posture, palpation, electromyography, orthopedic and neurological testing, etc.) The millimeters of misalignment we locate are not the gross misalignments which your eyes were trained to see. No reputable chiropractor looks at a radiograph to determine his or her adjustments each visit -- the primary reasons we take films are; to rule out pathology and malformation, to determine the degree of degeneration, if any, present in the spine and to assess postural alterations. You'd criticize us as irresponsible and reckless if we didn't take x-rays!

From reading the other posts out there, I can tell that a lot of chiropractors have done their own profession a disservice by their unprofessional antics (ie ambulance chasing and daytime TV commercials) and lack of explanation of what we do. There are good and bad practitioners of every profession. The modern chiropractors coming out of school now actually receive a very sound medical education: our basics are the same (taught by MD's at my school), but in the later years of study, where MD's learn advanced pharmacology, emergency medicine, surgery, etc., we learn various techniques of adjusting, most of which don't include the stereotypical neck-twisting type of adjustments. Unfortunately, as a "new breed" of chiropractors, we have the task ahead of us of informing the public of what we do, repairing the damage done by the bad apples, and fighting sensationalist attacks such as this one, based on faulty research and spread around the world by people who are either misinformed, threatened, or just plain hateful.

While I doubt I will change your mind about chiropractors, I hope this post will help someone else out there gain some perspective and perhaps see the other side of the story.

By the way, did you hear the one about the Denver anesthesiologist who fell asleep while monitoring an eight-year-old boy getting tubes in his ears? The child died, so do anesthesiologists "need to be taken out of medicine", too????

[Old Professer]

I am proud to be a physician (anesthesiologist) with a stron[sic] background in internal medicine. One day at the Minnesota State Fair last September, I went to the exhibition hall where there was a chiropractor booth. The propaganda said free chiropractic evaluation, will help cure disease.

Here is the scary part -- remember that I CAN READ XRay[sic] (although I did not tell him that). He shot a back film, told me that my back was entirely out of alignment and that I would need extensive chiropractic manipulation. He also said that I am on a lot of medications that should be stopped for vitamins. I am on NO medicines, and I looked at the xray -- and there was[sic] NO misalignments...[sic]

Remember -- these are the people that stop perscriptions[sic], which IMHO probably kills many more people than vertebral artery disruption.

Finally, the vertebral artery supplies the lower brain, stroke of this artery can produce lock in[sic] syndrome where the upper brain is fine (Thought, emotion) but motor movements, including speaking, is[sic] gone...[sic]

Chriporactors[sic] need to be taken out of medicine.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

I loved your MD comments!

According to JAMA, Doctors are the THIRD LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH in America! The MD-kind!

This is simply why we ALL must be informed about our health and not blindly follow any medical practioner's advice.

AMPU

[oceanperch]

You have mail from a family that respects your field.

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

Today we have immigrant physicians willing to accept the scraps off the floor government throws them (which MDs no longer can). A lot of these people are practicing only because they are agreeable to the rates. The system must improve.

There are many areas of chiropractics to appreciate yet downsides as well. In each of these cases, who knows either what the pre-existing artery condition was or the extent of the cervical manipulation?