Here is an important article from the email newsletter of the Skeptics Society. J.D. Haines, a doctor and professor from the University of Oklahoma, describes the numerous cases where neck manipulations done by chiropractors have led to death and serious neurological injuries.
Fatal Adjustments: How Chiropractic Kills
When Kristi Bedenbaugh wanted relief from a bad sinus headache, the 24 year-old former beauty queen and medical office administrator made the mistake of consulting a chiropractor. An autopsy performed on Kristi revealed that the manipulation of her neck had split the inner walls of both vertebral arteries, resulting in a fatal stroke.
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The real tragedy is that cervical spine manipulation is totally worthless in treating problems like Kristi Bedenbaugh’s. So, however rare the incidence of adverse outcome, the risk always outweighs any perceived benefit. There is no medically proven benefit whatsoever to chiropractic manipulation of the cervical spine.
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The public is led to believe that physicians disparage chiropractors out of some sort of professional jealousy. Yet there is only one reason that physicians judge chiropractors so harshly. Medicine is scientifically based, whereas chiropractic is not supported by a single legitimate scientific study.
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Spinal manipulation has been used for thousands of years around the world to try and fix health problems. The modern version was developed by Daniel D Palmer in the nineteenth century and called chiropractic from the Greek words for doing and hand (praktikos and cheiro).
We all know that chiropractic treatments are very fatal if it not performed correctly. Chiropractor deals with our backbone, Backbone is very sensitive one wrong move can kill you.
Alright, in order to balance out this article, where are the:
“How drugs kill”
“How Western doctors kill”
“How electo-shock therapy maims”
“How babies are legally drugged with FDA Class II drugs”
,etc. articles?
(US FDA Class II drugs include heroin, cocaine, etc..)
Where are the numbers of each to prove which one is more dangerous? And if medicine were really scientifically based, why are there unusual side-effects and unknown reactions to so many of them?
You could go along with the ex-head of the US CDA and take your mercury-filled H1N1 vaccine, knowing that mercury is one of the most poisonous substances on earth (remember the mercury-in-tuna debacle?) and knowing that the same aforementioned ex-head of the US CDA is now working as a highly paid executive for the company that makes the H1N1 vaccine. Go ahead, take your vaccine, it’s scientific…
Please all you Chiros trying to defend a practice that has no basis in anything other than in your minds, sublexation is a theory never proven to do anything, placebo effect is as high as 60%, you could hit ur victims in the head with a bag o crap and cure them. If you wanted to be a real health care provider should have went to MD school, but I bet you tired that. I have never met a person that stated they wanted to grow up and be a chiro and I have never heard of anyone not being admitted to chiro schools. On top of that, when you look at chiro bios, most are hacks that went to little know colleges and might have graduated, then after boucing around at various jobs decided on chiro school or should i say ‘learn how to bill medicare/caid school’. Chiros stick to your fring pseudo science and sleep in the bed u made.
I had no idea that this was such a serious issue. I’ve been having back problems myself as of late, and have considered seeing a chiro – this has certainly made me think twice.
do a quick search on the cochrane review or pub med on spinal manipulative therapy. i think you’ll find it has a great deal of scientific backing for a wide number of musculoskeletal issues, the risk of a vertebral basilar artery insult from a chiropractic treatment is unlikely to be higher than from turning your head to reverse your car, or even getting your hair washed in a hairdressers (using a hair wash basin) the factor which causes the rupture is just rotation of the head, not specifically chiropractic treatment, and even then only in succeptible individuals with poor arteriovascular health.
Also +1 to DDan
for more info on the matter see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11805635
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16226631
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6491549
all point to manipulation being part of a multifactorial problem, not a specific cause. Adding weight to my mechanical cause argument from the last post. It’s simply rotation of the cervical spine! not chiropractic that causes this.
however, rotation of the head in daily movements and activities of daily living is unlikely to be given as a cause, more likely a spontaeous occurrence. Whereas a chiropractic treatment is more likely to be reported as a precipitating event, whether the stroke would have happened from normal movements or not!
“Medicine is scientifically based, whereas chiropractic is not supported by a single legitimate scientific study.”
Oh really. Then how do you explain http://www.drug-education.info/documents/iatrogenic.pdf
This was written by an MD and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that about 106,000 deaths per year were from nonerror, adverse effects of medications. But this was only in hospitals.
So if “medicine” (by which you must mean medicine that is administered by medical doctors) is so scientific, then why are over 100,000 people dying from nonerror, adverse effects?
And for the lucky ones who do not die from adverse effects, we have “116 million extra physician visits, 77 million extra prescriptions, 17 million emergency department visits, 8 million hospitalizations, 3 million long-term admissions, 199,000 additional deaths, and $77 billion in extra costs.”
If chiropractic is so dangerous, why are MDs malpractice insurance premiums so high while chiropractors is so cheap?
I can’t find the studies, but I have read that the probability of having a stroke from an adjustment is between 1 and 500,000 and 1 in a million. Given those odds, I would rather see a chiropractor for my aches and pains than a MD who is just going to prescribe me some drugs and send me on my way.