This article is a perfect example of why Simon Singh is being sued. It starts by showing a one-sided view that costs a significant loss of time, comes full circle to the admission that chiropractic helps people, and then some moron trying to plug their website – after all, its all just media hype.

I am the first to admit chiropractic is a limited scope practice. Just as neurosurgeons don’t treat ingrown toenails, chiropractors are limited to their own field of expertise. The reason that research into the treatment for infantile colic was carried out in the first place has nothing to do with smoke nor mirrors. When treating patients for neuro-musculo-skeletal disorders they noticed a reduction in other symptoms, such as the reduced frequency of colic-like episodes. Would it really be feasible to spend all that money and time on a stab in the dark? Unfortunately this body of evidence is confined to a collective of anecdotal evidence – not accepted by modern science, which sets double blind randomized controlled trials as the gold standard. Research like this is expensive and difficult to do. We don’t have a multi-billion pound pharmaceutical industry driving our profession nor the facilities to do it.

Also it is difficult to provide consistent data in these trials, as with the complexity of what we treat. Not everyone needs X amount of treatments – some people need half and some people need twice as much, which boils down to clinical experience and medical knowledge. These conditions are so subjective and multifactorial that a biomedical approach of “take two of these and call me in the morning” does not work with the chiropractic, which follows a biopsychosocial approach. I completely agree that there is a lot more evidence needed to back up the claims about infantile colic etc. and I’m afraid that might never happen with the bad, newspaper selling, dogmatic press it gets.

Some of the views concerning the origins of chiropractic are misplaced. The article is correct in stating it was D.D. Palmer, a magnetic healer, founded chiropractic a few years after osteopathy was born and around the time that x-rays were discovered. As it was back then, Palmer placed great importance on the subluxation theory as the cause of dis-ease (please note the hyphenated word dis-ease). I would like that citation about professing himself akin Christ! Haha that seems nonsense. No doubt chiropractic in its infancy had some idiosyncrasies that are laughable with the knowledge we have now. In this it is not alone. Look at the somewhat archaic practice of using leeches for blood letting, that has been reborn into modern medicine for the use in stimulating blood flow in severed limbs. The principle was hit and miss yes, but in practice it is significant.

Is chiropractic dangerous? Really? Perhaps over dramatized by Hollywood I would expect. There are two schools of thought. 1) chiropractic directly causes strokes (stoppage of blood to the brain) through occluding or even rupturing the vertebral artery during a cervical adjustment and it happens A LOT! (scientifically unknown). 2) The incidence of stroke post-chiropractic care is 1 in 1.3 million cervical adjustments, which is no higher than the risk of stroke within the general population and, if not a mere incidental finding, beyond that deemed a medical risk.

Killing a patient by direct intervention is called man slaughter and often results in a trial and sentencing. You’d think with this “risk” you’d hear more about these incidences! The truth is that some people have strokes. And people who have strokes often have neck pain. And people with neck pain often seek chiropractic care. The result? A few people have a stroke after receiving chiropractic care. It’s like walking down the street and seeing a car crash. Did you cause that car crash? No, because some cars crash and a lot of cars drive on the road, and you walk a lot next to roads.

There are people in every profession who see a good opportunity to abuse their position to make money, and sadly chiropractic is not exempt from that. I would like to think that those who put their own priorities before those of their patients are heading for a downfall and are subject to Darwin’s theory of evolution. For this reason I suggest that you visit a chiropractor on good recommendation, and should you have a favourable experience with a chiropractor, shout about it.

P.S. Edzard Ernst picks and chooses his evidence, so the basis for chirobase.org being reputable is void. He has been invited to openly discuss his views many times and has sadly declined.

I wonder which site Ben himself is on – is he a blogger, or does he write for the Guardian?

kulah.blogspot.com

I suspect Joan only scanned the web page that she/he refers to in ther cmment. The page covers the problems we treat in the clinic and not just chiropractic problems (these tend to be the ones listed before the “and” that Joan mentioned). I would not suggest that I could treat chronic blushing but the clinic’s Clinical Hypnotherapist does, and succesfully.

I have now ammended the web page to prevent this misunderstanding happening again.

Finally, I would suggest that if you go to your GP he/she would talk about treating your condition rather than curing you condition. So, this is not some sleight of hand that you un-charitably attributed to me but a reasonable use of english, n’est-ce pas?

We should also compare it against physios, osteopaths and inaction. Normally a drug wouldn’t be tested against a placebo because doing nothing is not the real world alternative – but in the case of back/neck/pelvis pain you get next to nothing useful from a GP except “take some painkillers and if it still hurts in a year or two we’ll think about sending you to a physio, if we haven’t all died of old age by then”
Chiropractic works – it really does. Don’t dismiss it out of ‘them and us’ obstinacy and ask some proper questions about it.
(sorry for being so long)

I like “ragged band of bloggers” has me visualising them going over the top – we few, we ragged band of bloggers…

surely ‘the ragged band of bloggers’ are *part of* the media now? rather than seeing this as ‘blogs vs the media’ we just just accept that blogging is mainstream and stop throwing rocks at each other from entrenched and polarised positions? might be more productive…

As I was saying, this whole thing could have been avoided the chiropracters had understood the Streisand Effect.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

That makes the anecdote score 15 all, I believe.

Check out the list of things that chiropractic will treat, after the ‘and’ break.

Chronic blushing? Poor sales performance? And more.

The chiropractors do seem to be quite cute about using the word treat, rather than cure, however.

Which might keep them away from trading standards, but does render anything they say somewhat meaningless.

I.e. if the treatment doesn’t work, well, it was only sold as a treatment, not a cure.

adventuresinnonsense.blogspot.com/2009/07/please-sign-letter-to-trading-standards.html

Re Ben’s article
“The MCA says this is a “vexatious campaign against the profession”, that it has nothing to hide”
Except maybe “the blue MCA patient information leaflets, or any patient information leaflets of your own that state you treat whiplash, colic or other childhood problems in your clinic …”

And when did Whiplash become a childhood problem??

There is a line here I think, that you do not cross under any circumstances, which is making unflattering and unfounded claims about the *beliefs* of a person or organisation. Confidently stating that the BCA accepts that the treatments are bogus but allows them to be used anyway requires evidence. But if you provide a diversity of peer-reviewed studies that tends to favour the premise that the treatments don’t work, stating that if the BCA wants chiropractic to be taken seriously as an evidence-based discipline they should weed out this sort of riff-raff should be completely acceptable.