Not exactly. I do get stiff, but I haven't had the numbness again. I have to be adjusted about every 2 or 3 months. Just as a weight lifter has to visit the gym on a regular basis in order to keep the muscles tone, so does the chiropractic patient need to visit the chiropractor fairly regularly in order to keep the back in alignment.
Chiropractic Woo?
- Thread starter Kahalachan
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No, it does not. It can be a reason to investigate a claim. Inre chiropracty, those claims are largely unfounded.
Our brains are built to make such, irrational, correlations.
You are lucky the chiro did not give you a life-threatening stroke.
Good luck.
The role of the government is to ensure that chiropractic follows licensing requirements, such as truth in advertising (which it doesn't if compared to medicine (which would be the responsible comparison)). And my question was whether or not it can justify professional status in the first place, considering that it fails on several critical characteristics (skill based on theoretical knowledge, public service and altruism (no demonstrable contribution to public health), self-regulation, testing of competence, etc.) and is otherwise redundant (services are duplicated by other professions/trades).
I think you have a false impression about the process. Realistically, you can only make this determination (if it can be made at all) in retrospect.
There is nothing particularly remarkable about that statement for several reasons. The extent to which physicians follow evidence-based medicine is variable (it represents a paradigm shift to some degree and we are still in a period of transition), so it is easy to fish around and find individuals who do not closely follow more objective evaluations. Back surgery is not very effective for back pain, and in a way chiropractic represents a placebo control for back surgery. It looks more like he has discounted the extent to which people improve on their own - attributing effects both to surgery and chiropractic without taking the placebo component into account (we have evidence that back surgeons as a group have done this (overestimated the benefit of their surgery)). And he deals with conditions which chiropractic may help, although not to a greater extent than other conventional treatments and not in a way that provides any theoretical basis to the underlying idea of subluxations.
Yes. They can unambiguously show which treatments are effective and which are not. Evidence-based medicine means that effective treatments become conventional treatments and ineffective ones do not.
To continue to evaluate the clinical situation and make suggestions based on evidence, or novel suggestions from a theoretical basis. And to enlist the opinions of people with specialized knowledge and experience.
Alternatively, I'd draw upon the powers on randomness and use two dice to select a letter of the alphabet, find a medical medium whose name starts with that letter and try the remedy du jour. In this case, I came up with B for Browne, so my patient is now on lecithin. Of course, any improvement (i.e. normal variation in the course of the problem, ongoing improvement from prior conventional treatments, subjective variation in the assessment of symptoms, worsening of any of the above but to a lesser extent than arbitrary expectations, etc.) will now be attributed to the lecithin with a wide latitude given to the temporal association. This result will then be generalized and constitute proof for my assertion that the entire snake oil industry is not a waste of time and money.
Peer-review serves to help me determine whether or not I can trust the authors' conclusions. This is important in areas where I am relatively ignorant and would not be able to make this determination on my own. But in the case of the JMPT, I can do my own peer-review. The problem with journals such as the one that you reference, is that because the "peer-review" is not done by people who are familiar with the ways in which scientific experimentation has shown us we can be fooled, they often allow stuff that has fooled the researchers into making invalid conclusions to pass. This means that people who are otherwise ignorant about the field should not trust the conclusions of the researchers.
For example, the research that you referenced earlier about chronic neck pain did not include a placebo-control group. We already know that the only consistent effect from placebo is a change in subjective perception and pain perception while the condition runs its natural course. And the outcome in that particular study was a change in pain perception without any change in the underlying condition. The placebo effect is always present, but the researchers did not provide any way of determining what, if anything, could also be attributed to the effect of chiropractic treatment. That makes their reported conclusion invalid. You cannot support your assertions by citing conclusions (without further evaluation) from research in a journal that regularly allows false conclusions to be published. That is the distinction that is being made when we refer to peer-reviewed journals.
I am willing to look at individual studies in the JMPT, but I will determine what conclusions can be drawn from the results rather than paying attention to what conclusions the authors drew.
Linda
We already know that our subjective perceptions are not able to tell us very much, if anything, about our underlying physical processes. Our research also shows us that the placebo effect consistently represents a change in subjective perception and pain perception while objective evaluations and the underlying course of the condition are unchanged. You have told us a story about how chiropractic treatment changed your subjective perception without any indication as to a change in an underlying physical process. Taking all that together, your story does not demonstrate any effect of chiropractic treatment that is different from the effect of placebo. Many people claim that the perception of benefit is sufficient to justify the field of chiropractic. My concern is that this is outweighed by the occasions when it has caused death and disability, and by the tremendous waste of resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
Linda
If I give a hyperglycemic diabetic 6 units of insulin and the blood sugar comes down, I take it from your line of reasoning, that there is nothing that that can prove the glucose didn't come down due to a placebo effect. PMSL. Just because I am a not a chiropractor and cannot explain to you why the adjustment works does not mean that it does not work.
I do not know of cases of death and disability. I am sure it can happen. There have been MDs that have caused death and disability in their patients, as well. If I feel sick, I am still going to go to my doctor.
There is nothing irrational about correlating positive outcomes from chiropractic care with the idea that perhaps chiropractic care works for some with certain conditions. I think it is irrational not to make that correlation. Case studies do help to support hypotheses. And when you add up all the people who claim to have benefitted from chiropractic, there is sufficient evidence to support the field. Chiropractic is not going to go the way of pseudosciences, such as phrenology, which could demonstrate no basis for its use.
JoeEllison
Cuddly Like a Koala Bear
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So, obviously, your initial claim to have been "cured" is false.
Further, what evidence do you have that there's any "misalignment" in your back? The studies I've read about show that the whole "alignment" thing in the chiropractic sense is generally nonsense.
I'm wondering if it isn't possible that the neurologists didn't find anything wrong with you because there's actually nothing neurologically wrong with you. Of course, if you were already seeing a chiropractor, I'm not totally unwilling to speculate about your general mental state...
The neurologist charged my insurance $1000.00 for his services and could give me no advice. He said he could not detect, through an EMG, any neurological deficits. I had seen chiropractors with positive benefits for years before the numbness. Once the neurologist gave me the impression I was going to live with numbness for the rest of my life or face surgery, I decided to once again visit a chiropractor. I wish I had spent the $35.00 on the chiropractor first. For some reason, I thought a chiropractor couldn't possibly help the condition I found myself in. The chiropractor proved me wrong.
The numbness was cured. I have not experienced it since.
Miss Anthrope
Illuminator
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Wait a minute. Where did the mention of surgery come from?
I should have also pointed out that a neck snap can leave you seriously dead, see Blue Wode’s posts #19 (bottom) and #26.
For a more complete explanation, see:
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/chirostroke.html
Chiropractic's Dirty Secret: Neck Manipulation and Strokes
For another article with up-to-date references (Blue Wode cites one, as well) see:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/554564
Cervical Spine Manipulation: An Alternative Medical Procedure with Potentially Fatal Complications
The bottom line is that chiro neck-snaps have not been shown to do anything that safer procedures cannot do; and the neck-snap can kill.
Alties always like to point out that all procedures have risks; but there is no reason to assume a risk when the benefit can be obtained otherwise.
You are really off the reservation. We have biochemical and metabolic studies that explain how insulin works. We also have clinical studies that show it works as expected; there is nothing placebo about it. Chiros have no such studies; although they talk as if they do.
You could not have chosen a worse example (insulin); which suggests that, at your level of understanding, you should be paying attention and asking questions- not arguing.
See my post, possibly just above.
And one bad crack to your neck from a chiropractor and you might not get up from the table at all…
That description is almost the opposite of my line of reasoning. That example is of changes, objectively measured, in physical processes. The story you originally told was about changes in subjective perception without changes in physical processes.
To change your example to something that would be somewhat analogous to my line of thinking....
You give someone 6 units of insulin because they felt dizzy. Afterwards, they no longer complain of feeling dizzy, so you conclude that insulin treats dizziness.
I don't know what that means.
One does not need to understand how/why something works in order to demonstrate that it does work. Lack of explanation is not the problem. Lack of a demonstrable effect that is different from the placebo effect is the problem.
You probably wouldn't. Unlike medicine, which is committed to monitoring harm in order to accurately weigh risk/benefit, chiropractic does not report on complications from procedures. The discovery of harm associated with chiropractic has had to come from outside of the profession (another reason why they would not normally not deserve the designation of "profession").
Linda
This is essentially a description of the state of medicine up to the mid 1800's. And we all know how well that worked.
Case studies are rarely, if ever, able to rule out alternate explanations, making them insufficient to serve as evidence.
"When you add up all the people who claim to have benefitted from blood-letting, there is sufficient evidence to support the practice."
Since we already know that people will benefit, no matter the specifics of what we do to them, it requires more than wishful thinking to be able to determine whether or not your proposed therapy provides additional benefit above and beyond that of placebo.
Linda
So why didn't the placebo effect work when the author of the Washington Post article had spinal surgery -- not once, but three times? According to him: "After three spinal surgeries since 2002, two lumbar and 2004's brutally intrusive cervical fusion, which put a piece of cadaver bone in my neck in a procedure that was supposed to correct chronic shoulder and arm pain -- and didn't -- I'm hoping to minimize my time under the knife."
Drudgewire
Critical Doofus
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Ummm... the placebo effect doesn't work until you introduce the placebo.
It's like if you took an aspirin and still had a headache and a friend told you he had the best cure in the world. Even if it's a sugar pill, there's no chance the placebo effect is going to work before you swallow it.
vIQleS
Muse
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Wait - you'd been seeing a chiropractor (who cracks and pops your spine) for years and then your arm goes numb?
Why do your 'outcome correlations' only work when something positive happens?
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