Please, Please, Please Go To a Real Doctor

[steenkh]

It is my understanding she fell and injured her neck. She went to the hospital and the hospital released her with a diagnosis of a pinched nerve.

Is a "pinched nerve" an actual diagnosis of the kind that hospitals would make? It is my understanding that "pinched nerves" is chirospeak for myositis, i.e. a kind of inflammation.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Is a "pinched nerve" an actual diagnosis of the kind that hospitals would make? It is my understanding that "pinched nerves" is chirospeak for myositis, i.e. a kind of inflammation.

It might be that chiropracters misuse a legitimate term but pinched nerve is simply a literal term:

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pinched-nerve/basics/definition/con-20029601

 

[steenkh]

It might be that chiropracters misuse a legitimate term but pinched nerve is simply a literal term:

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pinched-nerve/basics/definition/con-20029601

Thanks.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

TMZ is claiming the autopsy is pretty specific that the adjustment causes the tear in her artery, other sites are repeating this story.

http://www.tmz.com/2016/10/19/model-katie-may-chiropractor-cause-of-death/

 

[fuelair]

I am sorry for her. I hope the chiro gets prison time.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

I am sorry for her. I hope the chiro gets prison time.

Coroner ruled it accidental, so I would think prison time is not in the cards.

 

[Blue Wode]

Coroner ruled it accidental, so I would think prison time is not in the cards.

If the following is anything to go by, her chiropractor is not off the hook...

A coroner's jury, which concluded that Lana Dale Lewis of Toronto was killed by a chiropractic neck manipulation, has ruled that her death was "accidental" rather than "natural." On September 1, 1996, six days after manipulation of her upper neck, Lewis was admitted to Queensway General Hospital suffering from a stroke. She died from another stroke on September 12. The word "accidental" means "not due to natural causes. The issue at the inquest was whether her death was due to natural causes (hardening of the arteries) or an injury to an artery caused by the manipulation. As explained by Amani Oakley, the attorney who represented Lewis's survivors:

An inquest jury in Ontario can only find one of five one-word verdicts: homicide, suicide, accident, natural causes and undetermined. They cannot actually point the finger of blame to anyone, so it is not open to them to make a finding of "death from a chiropractic manipulation. However, they were clearly instructed by the Coroner and other counsel that if they were convinced that the cause of Lana Lewis' stroke was as a result of the neck manipulation, this would be a traumatic origin of the stroke, and their verdict would be 'accident." If they believed that the stroke she died from was as a result of her lifestyle, health condition, etc., then the verdict would be 'natural causes'. If they were not sure which of the two it was, then their finding would be undetermined.

Link: http://www.chirobase.org/15News/lewis.html

Katie May's family is discussing taking possible legal action
http://people.com/bodies/family-of-...or-visit-speaks-out-the-pain-never-goes-away/

 

[fuelair]

I know I can't, but I would love to be on the jury!!!!!!!!!

 

[Joey McGee]

If Katie May's family wants to honor her memory I would advise them to take the scientific results and go on the warpath of social awareness making sure this never happens again by convincing the public that this is on par with bleeding and leeches.

 

[Minoosh]

Turns out some leeches have very therapeutic spit.

Learn something new every day!

 

[Joey McGee]

Leeching is used for about .1 percent of the conditions it used to be used for. Bloodletting is still used extremely rarely. Spinal adjustment might be useful in about .1% of the conditions it is currently used for. So, it is indeed on par.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

If the following is anything to go by, her chiropractor is not off the hook...http://people.com/bodies/family-of-...or-visit-speaks-out-the-pain-never-goes-away/

I didn't mean to imply "off the hook" as in no possible consequences. I expect he could still face a civil suit. However, I wonder if my original assumption that coroners ruling of accidental precludes all crimes is correct. There might be the possibility of some crime involving negligence possibly? I'm not a lawyer and wasn't able to sort that out with a few google searches.

 

[bigred]

One more time:

She went to the hospital and the hospital released her with a diagnosis of a pinched nerve. Then she went to the chiropractor a couple times in later days for treatment of that pinched nerve.

No offense, but any time something happens that might put one of those charlatans out of business I have trouble being unhappy about it. Chiropractic needs to be made illegal in the US!!!

No offense, but your extreme ignorance of "chiropractic" is pathetic, to say nothing of your knee-jerk emotional reaction based on this one case.

I hope the chiro gets prison time.

OK I hope every Dr. who treats someone who then dies who IN HINDSIGHT might not have otherwise gets prison time.

Hurray for pretzel logic!

I know I can't, but I would love to be on the jury!!!!!!!!!

So would I, so I could tell you that you could rant till the gates of Hell collapse, but you're not getting a conviction from me.

If Katie May's family wants to honor her memory I would advise them to take the scientific results and go on the warpath of social awareness making sure this never happens again by convincing the public that this is on par with bleeding and leeches.

Your post is on par with bleeding and leeches.

But hey y'all, enjoy the pitchfork n torch party.

 

[bigred]

Actually, that's useful,

Actually, no it's not.....

I was one of those people who went around mindlessly repeating that "third most common cause of death" idea.

It's mindless to believe Johns Hopkins? OK......

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hird-leading-cause-of-death-in-united-states/

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I agree. Interestingly, the story is international news now, and three MDs have blogged on it in the last 24 hours...

David Gorski
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2...-neck-did-cause-katie-mays-death-from-stroke/

Steven Novella
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/chiropractic-and-strokes/

Edzard Ernst
http://edzardernst.com/2016/10/top-model-died-as-a-result-of-visiting-a-chiropractor/

Given that there are no reliable methods available to screen for patients who might be predisposed to suffering a vertebrobasilar artery dissection resulting from neck manipulation, it might be time to ban the procedure.

Yes it is time. This was the first thing that came to my mind as well. I had a patient once in the hospital. He fell off a roof, went to a chiropractor and ended up a quadriplegic from this very injury, a vertebral artery rupture from the neck manipulation.

 

[calebprime]

Actually, no it's not.....


It's mindless to believe Johns Hopkins? OK......

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hird-leading-cause-of-death-in-united-states/

No, it's useful to question a meme like "third leading cause of death", and to dig a little deeper.

From JM's link:

I’ll conclude by giving my answer to the question that all of these studies ask, starting with the IOM report: How many deaths in the US are due to medical errors? The answer is: I don’t know! And neither do Makary and Daniels—or anyone else for sure. I do know that there might be a couple of hundred thousand possibly preventable deaths in hospitals, but that number might be much lower or higher depending on how you define “preventable.” I’m also pretty sure that medical errors, in and of themselves, are not the number three cause of deaths. That’s because medical errors rarely occur in isolation from serious medical conditions, which means it’s very to attribute most deaths to primarily a medical error. That number of 250,000 almost certainly includes a lot of deaths that were not primarily due to medical error, given that that’s 9% of all deaths every year.

But it’s even more than that. As I mentioned above, According to the CDC, of the 2.6 million deaths that occur every year in the U.S., 715,000 occur in hospitals, which means that, if Makary’s estimates are correct, 35% of all hospital deaths are due to medical errors. On its face, such a claim is very hard to believe, especially if you consider that, of those who died in a hospital, 75% were age 65 and over, and 27% were age 85 and over. That’s a lot of people prone to dying because they are old and ill, regardless of how good their care was. Add to that the fact that between 2000 and 2010, hospital deaths decreased 8% even though the number of hospitalizations increased 11%, and Makary’s numbers become less and less credible.

 

[Joey McGee]

Your post is on par with bleeding and leeches.

But hey y'all, enjoy the pitchfork n torch party.

lol the butthurt over having your pet beliefs skewered and ridiculed is showing.

Actually, no it's not.....


It's mindless to believe Johns Hopkins? OK......

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hird-leading-cause-of-death-in-united-states/

lmao, yeah, I guess you didn't read Steven Novella's thoughts on these claims that I highlighted. Sciencebasedmedicine is an important site, he was/is the JREF's medical expert. What Myriad tried to do with that statistic was a *********** joke. You're saying nothing, how about you try responding to what Novella says as to demonstrate a firm command of the issues involved and then I'll respond to you further. lmao

 

[Myriad]

What I said remains true, and obviously so, regardless of what rank in the list of causes of death medical error achieves. Quite simply, if one has a minor injury that does not require medical treatment by another person, then the lowest risk option is to not seek such medical treatment. Because seeking and receiving treatment, however competent and professional, obviously carries risks, including not only the risks of medical error but other hazards such as travel to and from a medical facility, infections acquired at the medical facility, and (here in the U.S.) very high costs that can contribute to the many other known health risks associated with poverty.

Since certain details of the autopsy results are unclear or unknown, we don't know for sure whether or not Ms. May's initial injury prior to any chiropractic procedure required any intervention to avoid the fatal arterial rupture or other severe medical consequences, but the consensus seems to be that it probably did not. Hence, "Ms. May's best chance of survival was probably avoiding the chiropractors, avoiding the real doctors equally, and resting up until it felt better."

 

[Belz...]

No offense, but your extreme ignorance of "chiropractic" is pathetic, to say nothing of your knee-jerk emotional reaction based on this one case.

Chiropractic is useless and dangerous. One may feel better after a session, but then maybe all they need is a good massage, which doesn't carry any of the risks.

Witch doctors, the lot of them.

 

[Giordano]

My views of chiropractors have condensed into the following:

1. Some chiropractors my indeed be useful (better than a placebo effect) on certain back problems or pain referred from the spine (e.g. sciatic).

2. An important concern however is that many chiropractic treatments of these areas are abrupt, sudden, and approach in some cases violent. I think much of this is for drama rather then actual medical purposes. This puts the patient (e.g. as in the OP) at much greater risk of serious damage than the more gentle and controlled manipulations of physical therapists and sports medicine MDs/physician assistants. Personally I would prefer to go to one of these latter professionals for a back (or joint) problem.

3. Placebo effects are very real. Placebos are used in any clinical trial of a new drug; look up how much better the patient's (their doctors') evaluation of the effect is even in the placebo arm of these studies. Typically anywhere from 10 to 50% of the patients fell better (and are evaluated better) on the placebos when no one knows who received the placebo and who received the new drug. And it is not just that they think they are better- a number of actual measures (blood pressure, etc) are better on the placebo- our thoughts do affect some of our body functions. Oddly the same holds true for "placebo" arms of these trials in terms of negative side-effects. Patients often will report more negative effects even with mock treatments, especially if they have come to expect a particular negative side effect from the drug used in the other arms of the study (e.g. nausea).

Also of course people tend to get better with time whatever the treatment. A course of chiropractic therapy over many months may show improvement for this reason alone.

In evidence-based medicine drugs and treatments that are approved for clinical use have to perform significantly better than the placebos. Unlike chiropractic medicine.

4. Any chiropractor making a claim that back manipulations can help any non-spinal problem better than a placebo is a quack (probably self-deluded). They may produce a positive placebo effect in their patients (many have testified that they feel better) but with the risk of possibly significant injury and the danger of keeping the patient away from evidence-based treatments.