Chiropractic medicine.

[Jeff Corey]

One word. Subluxations.

 

[Jeff Corey]

How can any of you, that know little or nothing about medicine or chiropractic, be so sure that chiropractic doesn't work .

What an assumption. How can you, with no worthwhile training whatsoever, assume we know nothing about medicine or chiroquacktic? Do you really know what they think "subluxations" are and what they supposedly cause?

 

[zenotter]

I've heard of something called network chiropractic that doesn't involve snapping adjustments, rather waves of healing energy that have a byproduct of spinal alignment for the client. Too woo for me.

I started visiting a regular chiropractor several years ago after a car accident. I wouldn't consider him woo at all, though I think he's a raw foodie vegetarian. (More power to him; I couldn't do that for long.)

Now I go occasionally and mainly for the A.R.T.* they offer. The LMTs who work on me have a way more successful time getting the kinks worked out of my upper back and neck with this technique as compared to regular massage. The occasional adjustment afterwards always seems to help, probably because I'm iced afterwards. It's not a snap-only place.

*A.R.T. = Active Release Technique; www(dot)activerelease(dot)com.

 

[Rodney]

How can any of you, that know little or nothing about medicine or chiropractic, be so sure that chiropractic doesn't work (or works)?

Careful now, Phytotherapist. If medical geniuses like Randi and Shermer say it doesn't work, then how can you -- a mere medical specialist -- even consider that it could possibly work? I hereby order you to do penance by reading all the past chiropractic threads on this forum.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Careful now, Phytotherapist. If medical geniuses like Randi and Shermer say it doesn't work, then how can you -- a mere medical specialist -- even consider that it could possibly work? I hereby order you to do penance by reading all the past chiropractic threads on this forum.

A "mere medical specialist"? He's a herbalist, and may know less scientific medicine than you do.
Maybe you can tell me about subluxations causing diabetes and cancer.

 

[Acleron]

A "mere medical specialist"? He's a herbalist, and may know less scientific medicine than you do.
Maybe you can tell me about subluxations causing diabetes and cancer.

Jeff Corey beat me to it.

A phytotherapist is a herbalist in a new guise. Strange how they need to change the name to protect the innocent, sorry guilty.

 

[arthwollipot]

How can any of you, that know little or nothing about medicine or chiropractic, be so sure that chiropractic doesn't work (or works)?

Ahem.

Here is the most up-to-date scientific study on spinal manipulation:

A systematic review of systematic reviews of spinal manipulation

CONCLUSIONS: Collectively these data do not demonstrate that spinal manipulation is an effective intervention for any condition. Given the possibility of adverse effects, this review does not suggest that spinal manipulation is a recommendable treatment.

http://www.jrsm.org/cgi/content/abstract/99/4/192

And here is the most up-to-date scientific study on complications associated with spinal manipulation:

Adverse effects of spinal manipulation: a systematic review

CONCLUSIONS: Spinal manipulation, particularly when performed on the upper spine, is frequently associated with mild to moderate adverse effects. It can also result in serious complications such as vertebral artery dissection followed by stroke. Currently, the incidence of such events is not known. In the interest of patient safety we should reconsider our policy towards the routine use of spinal manipulation.

http://www.jrsm.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/7/330

And here is the most up-to-date scientific study on complications associated with paediatric spinal manipulation:

Adverse Events Associated With Pediatric Spinal Manipulation: A Systematic Review

CONCLUSIONS. Serious adverse events may be associated with pediatric spinal manipulation; neither causation nor incidence rates can be inferred from observational data. Conduct of a prospective population-based active surveillance study is required to properly assess the possibility of rare, yet serious, adverse events as a result of spinal manipulation on pediatric patients.

[URL]http://pediatrics.aappublications.or...act/119/1/e275[/URL]

Note what the National Council Against Health Fraud had to say about the paediatric study:

Adverse events associated with chiropractic care of children. A systematic review has identified 34 cases in which spinal manipulation in children was associated with adverse events. [Vohra S. Adverse events associated with pediatric spinal manipulation: A systematic review. Pediatrics 119(1) January 2007, pp. e275-e283] Fourteen of the cases involved "direct" events in which the treatment was followed by death, serious injury, symptoms requiring medical attention, or soreness. The rest involved "indirect" events in which appropriate diagnosis was delayed and/or inappropriate manipulation was done for serious medical conditions such as meningitis. The reviewers commented that despite the fact that spinal manipulation is widely used on children, pediatric safety data are virtually nonexistent. This type of review cannot determine how often adverse events occur. That would require a prospective study with active surveillance. The article did not consider harmful aspects of chiropractic care that are far more common than the reported events. These include (a) decreased use of immunization due to misinformation given to parents, (b) psychologic harm related to unnecessary treatment, (c) psychologic harm caused by exposure to false chiropractic beliefs about "subluxations," and (d) financial harm due to unnecessary treatment.

[URL]http://www.ncahf.org/digest07/07-14.html[/URL]

[My Bold]


How many people knowing the above facts (and they have an ethical and legal right to be informed of them) would still go to a chiropractor?




To help you understand that this would appear to apply to the majority of chiropractors, I suggest that you read these two recent threads (both are three pages long):

MSNBC/Self article: dangers of chiropractic
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=85046&highlight=chiropractic

Chiropractic Woo?
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=85436&highlight=chiropractic

 

[Jeff Corey]

Jeff Corey beat me to it.

A phytotherapist is a herbalist in a new guise. Strange how they need to change the name to protect the innocent, sorry guilty.

I'm sorry I can't figure out how to post the Gary Larson cartoon, "A wolf in sheep's clothing".
But you get the idea. They have to change the name to protect the guilty.

 

[Physiotherapist]

Don't jump to conclusions and make massive assumptions about somebody's screen name!!

Why don't you look back over previous threads and posts and you will see that as well as being a Phytotherapist/herbalist, he is in fact a fully qualified medical practitioner who is Italian and lives and practices in Italy.

 

[Blue Wode]

In today’s news:

'Painkillers and a walk are best for back pain'
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article2836326.ece

The best treatment for acute lower back pain is a painkiller plus normal activity, a trial in Australia has shown.

Fancier treatments such as spinal manipulation, or the use of an anti-inflammatory drug, did nothing to speed recovery, say Mark Hancock, of the Back Pain Research Group at the University of Sydney, and colleagues.

-snip-

In a commentary in the medical journal The Lancet, Dr Bart Koes, of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, says that the findings may have wider implications.

“The important message is that the management of acute low back pain in primary care (advice and prescription of paracetemol) is sufficient for most patients.”

Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at Peninsula Medical School, Exeter, said: “The study seems to impressively confirm what has been known for some time, even some of the more enlightened guidelines include advice along those lines.”

Dr Stuart Derbyshire, senior lecturer in the School of Psychology and an expert in pain at the University of Birmingham, said: “For most people, providing simple care and advice should guide the patient through their acute phase of pain and allow them to return to normal life when that acute phase is over. It is reassuring that this appears to have happened in The Lancet study.”

 

[JJM]

{snip}

15 years ago I met an American chiropractor mainly practising manipulation of the backbone. He sees an average of 30-40 people each day and refers many of them to me for, sometimes serious, medical problems. Almost all of his clients belong to the upper-middle class and pay 100-120 EUR for a single treatment. To be honest, I must say that all the patients he refers to me are more than satisfied with his "treatments" and none of them has had any side-effect from his "treatments".

An excellent orthopaedic specialist (friend of mine) and I went to visit him and we've been the whole working day in his practice where he "visited" and "treated" 32 clients. We were allowed to ask questions to him and to his clients.

This is an anecdote- it proves nothing. Once a chiro is licensed to practice, they can do whatever they please- there is little, actual, quality control. You may have seen one of the few that realizes his limits, or you may not have recognized his quackery.

{snip}

How can any of you, that know little or nothing about medicine or chiropractic, be so sure that chiropractic doesn't work (or works)? By the way, Americans are, by far, the best chiropractors in Italy and there hasn't been a single case of malpractice reported.

[FONT=&quot]Post #2 in this thread leads to plenty of expert analysis that you should read (www.chirobase.org) before you ask if we have any basis for our opinions. That web-site is a sub-site of www.quackwatch.org, which is run by Stephen Barrett (MD) who has studied chiropractors for more than 35 years After studying the literature, if you have any unanswered questions I am sure we can help you. [/FONT]

 

[JJM]

Chiropractic is based on two silly notions. One is Innate Intelligence (life force) which is rarely discussed because it is embarrassing. The other is the subluxation, to which they desperately cling because, without it, they are merely masseurs.

Subluxation is a medical term referring to a dislocated joint, the chiros used to say they could find them in the spine. They could even see them in x-rays, until they were asked to read unlabeled x-rays and were forced to admit they could not see anything. So, rather than admit the (invisible) subluxations do not exist, they defined a chiro subluxation as anything they could pretend to fix.
http://www.chirocolleges.org/paradigm_scope.html

Chiropractic is Concerned with the preservation and restoration of health, and focuses particular attention on the subluxation.
A subluxation is a complex of functional and/or structural and/or pathological articular changes that compromise neural integrity and may influence organ system function and general health.
[FONT=&quot]A[/FONT][FONT=&quot] subluxation is evaluated, diagnosed, and managed through the use of chiropractic procedures based on the best available rational and empirical evidence.

[/FONT]

The subluxation "pinches" a nerve exiting the spine and, thus, interferes with nerve signals going to and from the visceral organs- resulting in disease. This is treated with a chiro adjustment of the spine. At Chirobase, search for Crelin and read his experiments showing that even if pinched nerves existed, chiros could not adjust them.


There is a further problem with chiro notions that is rarely mentioned- most visceral organs function normally with no connection to the spine. Ask any doctor, transplanted organs are not connected to the spine. Chiros deny these facts, one even pointed me to this article on heart reinnervation after transplant.
[FONT=&quot]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10528745&dopt=Abstract [/FONT]
Too bad he did not read his own reference; because it supports my assertion. The article describes people who average two years post-transplant with no reinnervation. It also includes people averaging four years post-op who have slight reinnervation. A cardiologist at Harvard confirmed, for me, that heart reinnervation is slow and of little consequence.

The bottom line- the subluxation cannot be demonstrated, pinched nerves cannot be adjusted, and the nerves are not even necessary.

 

[Nick73]

Are there different types of chiropractic?

I only ask because in the UK it has a veneer of respectability. One of the Universities wher I studied had a chiropractic degree (w3.glam.ac.uk/coursedetails/685/130), and have since developed a chiropractic clinic (w3.hesas.glam.ac.uk/facilities/chiropractic/) that runs under the auspices fo the University. (Is it a coincidence that the same University is reported to be one of the most financially stable (at least of the new Universities) in the UK?) When I was there I never really paid any attention to it. However in recent years I have (obviously) become more interested in skepticism and critical thinking.

I can still remember the complete shock I felt the first time I went to quackwatch and found long reference to chiropractic medicine. I was amazed because the Degree status of the discipline stops people (including myself) questioning it s efficacy too much. (It is a practical example of argument from authority I suppose. "It must work because we have a degree about it"). I particularly remember it getting up everyones nose because the third year undergraduates insisted on everyone refering to them as Doctor

So my question is are there diferent varieties of chiropractic, and hence Im confusing the two or is it all the same area? Or in other words is my old Uni fleecing the good people of Wales or is theres a different 'brand' of Chiro?

Ill give you an example, Kinesiology, in my field is the biomechanical analyses of movement and forces in the performance of some motor skill. I was surprised to find references to Applied Kinesiology in quackwatch, but despite the similarities of name this refers to a woo belief (similar to choiro i believe....but have been wrong before).

PS i have to put W3 instead of www as I have less than 15 post...my bad

 

[Jeff Corey]

Don't jump to conclusions and make massive assumptions about somebody's screen name!!

Why don't you look back over previous threads and posts and you will see that as well as being a Phytotherapist/herbalist, he is in fact a fully qualified medical practitioner who is Italian and lives and practices in Italy.

So he says.

 

[Cuddles]

Are there different types of chiropractic?

Yes and no. Technically, chiropractic refers only to the beliefs and practice described by JJM - life force, non-existant subluxations and denial of germ theory. However, it has come to be mean basically massage with a different name. It's a problem, because massage and physical therapy are perfectly valid therapies and many chiropracters are actually qualified in real medicine and practice as such with no mention of the woo. This makes it a problem to argue against chiropractic in general because a lot of the time it is actually useful. The woos manage to hide behind the physiotherapists and can get away with their quackery because no-one can quite pin them down.

It's sort of similar to homeopathy. Very few people actually understand what homeopathy is, and a huge amount of stuff that is called homeopathic is actually no such thing. A lot of it is herbal, which has it's own problems, but in some cases could actually have an effect, and some is simply medicine with a label saying homeopathic. This makes it hard to argue with sometimes because when someone claims that a homeopathic remedy worked, it's entirely possible it did, it just wasn't actually homeopathic.

 

[JJM]

Are there different types of chiropractic? {snip}

Yes, but ... They are a cult, united around DD Palmer's subluxation notion; their schools and organizations would have you believe they are all equivalent. After that, just about anything goes. Someone has observed that chiros agree on little except opposition to criticism.

There are "straights" who only adjust the spine, and "mixers" who freely incorporate other quackery. Each chiro has his/her way of detecting subluxations, and that still includes x-ray in some cases. Then, some only "adjust" the neck (in one case, a woman with a bruised tail-bone had a stroke after the chiro adjusted her neck!). Some chiros concentrate on the other end, while trying to avoid sex-abuse charges.

In addition to the diversity of "diagnosis" and where to treat, they have over 100 methods of adjustment. At their centennial celebration in 1995, one senior chiro observed that there is no clinical proof for the effectiveness of any of those methods.

There are a small number (ca. 5%) who continue to practice under chiro licensure; but who reject subluxations. These people try to work within evidence-based therapy, much like physical therapists. However, I don't know if they are that well educated. Also, PTs work under doctors' orders and do not diagnose; whereas these guys do their own diagnosis as if they had medical knowledge and experience.

I hope that answers your question, if not I'll try to answer other questions. I should note that I have very little info specific to chiros in Britain. However, if they believe in subluxations they cannot be better than those in North America.

 

[JJM]

Yes and no.

I almost wrote that while you posted.

{snip} [M]any chiropracters are actually qualified in real medicine and practice as such with no mention of the woo.

I must dispute the word "many." According to the survey I cited previously, only 12% eschew the subluxation, and 94% believe a regular back adjustment is beneficial. And, as I cited (after you posted) only around 5% practice evidence-based therapy (that is the enrollment in the American Association of Chiropractic Medicine- much reviled by mainstream chiros).

This makes it a problem to argue against chiropractic in general because a lot of the time it is actually useful. The woos manage to hide behind the physiotherapists and can get away with their quackery because no-one can quite pin them down. {snip}

It is easy to argue against chiropractic in general, their own survey shows the prevalence of woo. However, it is difficult to know what any, individual chiro practices.

 

[Fnord]

Shouldn't this thread be split into two separate threads, one named "Chiropractic" and the other named "Medicine"?

I mean ... they are two completely different subjects, after all ...

 

[Blue Wode]

Chiropractic is based on two silly notions. One is Innate Intelligence (life force) which is rarely discussed because it is embarrassing.

…even although the members of two chiropractic organisations in the UK still buy into it:

United Chiropractic Association:

Vitalism: We ascribe to the idea that all living organisms are sustained by an innate intelligence, which is both different from and greater than physical and chemical forces. Further we believe innate intelligence is an expression of universal intelligence.

-snip-

We recognize that interference to innate intelligence (Subluxation) diminishes healing capacity, with an alteration in the dynamic interrelationship between mental, physical and social aspects of the whole person.

http://www.united-chiropractic.org/modules/content/index.php?id=4

McTimoney Chiropractic Association:

By correctly training the hands as an instrument of innate intelligence, healing can be encouraged to take place by the detection and correction of bony subluxations (slight displacements).

http://www.mctimoney-chiropractic.org/mca_objectives.htm

The other is the subluxation, to which they desperately cling because, without it, they are merely masseurs.

...and like the two organisations already mentioned, here are another two UK chiropractic organisations whose members are apparently desperate not to be viewed as merely masseurs:

British Chiropractic Association:

As you go through life, a loss of proper function (movement) in the vertebrae, which some chiropractors call a subluxation, may interfere with the healthy working of your spine and the nerves that run through it. This may affect your body’s natural ability to recover from injury and you may find yourself increasingly unwell, unable to shake off apparently minor aches, pains and even some illness.

http://www.chiropractic-uk.co.uk/gfx/uploads/textbox/Servicing your spine.pdf

Scottish Chiropractic Association (see under ‘What problems can be helped?’):

Chiropractors are able to examine and evaluate a child's spine to determine if they can help problems such as colic, asthma, bedwetting, eczema and sleeping difficulties. Chiropractors advise that a child's spine be checked for subluxations and postural distortions before any symptoms are even present.

http://www.sca-chiropractic.org/index2.htm

in the UK it [chiropractic] has a veneer of respectability. One of the Universities wher I studied had a chiropractic degree (w3.glam.ac.uk/coursedetails/685/130), and have since developed a chiropractic clinic (w3.hesas.glam.ac.uk/facilities/chiropractic/) that runs under the auspices fo the University.

In the UK, the chiropractic regulatory body, the General Chiropractic Council (GCC), is responsible for the accreditation of all chiropractic degrees in the UK. For some eye-opening information on the GCC, and a revealing look at the deceptive behavior of the chiropractic “profession” in general in the UK, I suggest that you read this page:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=85046&page=2

For a great summary of the chiropractic educational and regulatory situation in the UK see the end of this article:
http://www.skeptics.org.uk/article.php?dir=articles&article=chiropractic.php

I can still remember the complete shock I felt the first time I went to quackwatch and found long reference to chiropractic medicine. I was amazed because the Degree status of the discipline stops people (including myself) questioning it s efficacy too much. (It is a practical example of argument from authority I suppose. "It must work because we have a degree about it").

[My bold]

It would seem that that’s exactly what the chiropractic profession banks on.

I particularly remember it getting up everyones nose because the third year undergraduates insisted on everyone refering to them as Doctor

Chiropractors are not permitted to call themselves “doctors (of chiropractic)” until after they have graduated.

Kinesiology, in my field is the biomechanical analyses of movement and forces in the performance of some motor skill. I was surprised to find references to Applied Kinesiology in quackwatch, but despite the similarities of name this refers to a woo belief

Yes, there is absolutely no scientific evidence for Applied Kinnesiology, however, the GCC finds it an acceptable practice despite its Code of Ethics and Standard of Proficiency requiring that “chiropractors’ provision of care must be evidence based”. For verification of this, see one of the more recent GCC letters published on this page of the Action for Victims of Chiropractic website:
http://www.chirovictims.org.uk/victims/news.html

many chiropracters are actually qualified in real medicine

Would you please provide the evidence to support that claim.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

And, as I cited (after you posted) only around 5% practice evidence-based therapy (that is the enrollment in the American Association of Chiropractic Medicine- much reviled by mainstream chiros).

I can't imagine they're exactly embraced by the mainstream medical community either.