The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #58512   Message #928777
Posted By: Don Firth
08-Apr-03 - 01:29 PM
Thread Name: BS: Chiropractic
Subject: RE: BS: Chiropractic
Wolfgang, I must confess that I didn't read these articles exhaustively. I read a few paragraphs of a couple of the articles and scanned the titles of the rest. There may be positive articles listed, but they were buried in a plethora of negative articles, and the whole tenor of the web site appears to be negative. Being the son of a chiropractor, I have seen much of this sort of thing before, often given to me by people who were trying to convince me that my father is a quack and a crook.

When I read titles such as "Chiropractic's Dirty Secret: Neck Manipulation and Strokes," "Malpractice is an Inevitable Result of Chiropractic Philosophy and Training," "How Subluxation Theory Threatens Public Health," "Don't Let Chiropractors Fool You," and on and on, I don't see that there is much positive information offered in this web site. It appears to me that the whole purpose of the site is to try to convince people that Chiropractic is not just quackery, but that it is dangerous. In short, a hatchet job.

For example, I have had neck adjustments all my life. From some of the statistics I've seen in articles about the alleged relationship between neck adjustments and stroke, I should have been dead of a stroke or blood clot decades ago. I know many people who go to chiropractors regularly—and have neck adjustments regularly—and I don't know of a single case of this ever happening, no matter what some of these "learned journals" claim. Preconception itself manipulates data.

I have seen much of this anti-chiropractic propaganda, promulgated mainly by the American Medical Association and other, similar organizations that, rather than regarding chiropractic as a supplemental form of health care, regard it as some form of "competition." On several occasions in the past, the AMA tried to get chiropractic outlawed, and in some localities, they succeeded—it was illegal to give a chiropractic adjustment. These laws have since been rescinded, largely because of public demand. One would think that if the members of one particular school of health-care were sincerely interested in the welfare of their patients rather than in who gets the dollars, they would be far more open to other approaches to health care, and less eager to condemn out of hand.

Don Firth