Chiropractic hucksters

Time for a vacation blog. I’m on vacation this week, and I can’t help noticing all the ads in the local paper for various scams. Are pseudoscience and hoaxes are a necessary part of our tourism industry? People seem to enjoy being taken on ghost tours and trying out various sham treatments at resort spas, and buying whatever bogus “lucky” artifacts the locals are selling. But today’s post is prompted by a recurring back injury that I aggravated this week. It’s slowly getting better, aided by ibuprofen, but there are plenty of hucksters here who would love to give me a spinal “adjustment” to cure my pain – or so they claim in the local newspaper.

No thanks, I’ll stick with ibuprofen and rest. Chiropractic is, in the words of a recent book, “the greatest hoax of the century.” (See the book by L.A. Chotkowski at Amazon.com.)

Perhaps I should be amazed that chiropractic still flourishes after over a century in which not a single study has shown it to be effective. One reason is that chiropracters are numerous and well-organized – the reviews of Chotkowski's book on Amazon.com are mostly negative, and many are likely written by chiropracters. (If any of them read this blog, I’m sure I’ll get some similar comments.) Chiropracters call themselves doctors and use “Dr.” in front of their name, but they do not have medical training and are not M.D.’s. They have their own schools, with woefully low standards, and some of their beliefs are so strange that they would be laughable, except for the fact that these people actually inflict treatments on unsuspecting patients. The “profession” thrives despite the fact that the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare concluded 40 years ago that chiropractic education is inadequate and that chiropractic theory was not based upon any valid science.

(You want to know one of their wacko beliefs? Well, chiropractic teaches that correcting “vertebral “subluxations” will cure infections, by “boosting the immune system.” I have to put that last phrase in quotes because the very notion of boosting the immune system is questionable – listen to Mark Crislip’s excellent QuackCast for more on that topic. Even more crazy – and harmful – is their opposition to vaccines. A former president of the International Chiropractic Association said in 1993 that he was “a firm opponent of artificial immunization and the antiquated germ theory on which it is based.” Apparently the ICA doesn't believe that bacteria and viruses cause disease. Eventually, Darwinian selection will weed these crazies out of the population, but that will take too long for me.)

The evidence against chiropractice is voluminous, and I won’t try to summarize it here, but Chirobase has a long list of links, including comments on how chiropracters lure people in, on the various scientific studies – all negative – testing the effectiveness of chiropractic, and on the harm that chiropractic can cause. One of the scariest is the risk of stroke from their neck manipulations. Chiropracters claim (of course) that the risk is small, but why take any risk for a treatment that has never been shown to be effective? The risk is great enough that a Chiropractic Stroke Awareness Group has been formed to try to educate the public.

I’ll stick with ibuprofen and rest. Meanwhile, perhaps the local spa can offer me some aromatherapy. Hey, at least there’s no risk of stroke – and it smells nice.