As far as Chiropractors giving unnecessary treatments to patients I agree it definitely happens. Hell, I dropped my “mentor” because I believed he was over-treating, but you can argue that medical doctors have been known to do the same thing, a more specific example is when it comes to surgery. Orthopedic surgeons are in the business of doing surgery. That’s how they make their money. I’ve met tons of people who had surgery and still suffer from the issue they went under for. Some have had multiple surgeries for the same thing. Did they need the surgery? Maybe, maybe not. But they trust the doctor’s judgement regardless. I’ve also treated tons of people whom have been told they needed surgery, and through Chiropractic care, no longer suffer any pain or symptomatology and have not gone on for surgery. And I didn’t even use magnets or shake chicken bones or give them snake oil! LOL I’m not saying two wrongs make a right by any means, but simply pointing out that we must be cautious with who we trust with our healthcare. If someone wants to go to a Chiropractor or ANY doctor, I recommend they talk to friends and or family and choose one that suits them.

“Belive” was a BAD choice of wording on my part. I should have known you’d run with that. Haha! If there is a placebo effect in my office, it’s minimized by my methods which I believe to be similar to most of my colleagues. In my practice I take photographs of my patient’s posture before their first treatment and every few treatments and also take measurements of ranges of motion to get an unbiased, numerical reading of their progress just to name a couple of examples. This is allows me to show my patients whether (or not) we are helping. If we’ve reached a plateau in progress we change things up, add exercises, stretches etc. if they even need to continue care at all. Because I know about a thousand more Chiropractors than you do, I am confident to put you at east that you are incorrect in your assumption that a “vast majority” of Chiropractors practice the more outlandish techniques. My last trimester of school 2 students out of about 100 were reprimanded for treating patients with some of these methods you must be referring to. This is definitely not the norm and schools are taking steps to minimize this. I can only assume that your assumption is solely based on blogs and threads you’ve seen on the internet and it’s a fact that people whom have bad experiences are far more likely to speak up than people who had a good one. For instance, if you went to a restaurant and saw a rat or bug crawl across the kitchen floor, you might tell 5 people, but if you went to a restaurant that seemed completely clean you wouldn’t tell anyone because there was nothing of concern. That’s just human nature.

I’m sure you are correct in that lots of people have had “shady dealing” with DCs and you encouraged me to google that. Well, I encourage you to google the positive experiences too as well as “shady dealings” with other types of docs such as orthopedic surgeons. (I just searched the latter and found a TON of articles about unnecessary surgeries) And next time you lean over to pick something up and one of your paraspinal muscles spasms causing one of your lumbar vertebrae which it’s connected to to get yanked to one side sending horrible pain down the back your butt into the back of your leg due to a nerve impingement, go to your MD and get some muscle relaxers and a pain killer if you like and don’t mind the side effects of. My patients can continue to come to my office when this happens and I can give them immediate relief by fixing the problem at it’s source (the spinal fixation or “subluxation” as some of my colleagues call it) as well as teach them ways to prevent that from happening in the future. (By the way that ‘s’ work has created a huge divide amongst our profession and I personally prefer not to use it… shhhh!!)

As far as arguing with you, that’s just for sport The truth is I like you Jason. You are a very good debater. I like to think I am too and I love a challenge so I am thoroughly enjoying myself and learning a ton from you about how some of the public may view my profession and how I can work to better it. I’ve also been brainstorming ideas for my website, newsletters and health talks, so I thank you for that!

More over, no where did I call you a “dumb chiropractor with a sub-par education”. If you choose to be offended then that’s on you. The fact of the matter is you’re likely more educated than I am. What I post here are my observations and opinions and as such they are my own, yet it’s interesting how many other people out there with absolutely no ulterior motive is also “trying to discredit you and your profession”. If I were a MD and bashing DC’s then you could easily dismiss anything I said as professional rivalry, but that isn’t the case.

As to the danger of chiropractic procedures, my previous statements stands and no one has been able to counter it; those chiropractors that use “strange methods” to use your words and sell only good feelings, some attention and CO2 are a danger to their patients because they are using big scary words and funky devices to convince good people that they need some unnecessary procedure. The “doctors” then charge exorbitant fees for said treatment over the course of sometimes months all the while couching those proceedings in good will and trust. That makes them sham artists and those kinds of shenanigans DO go on whether you practice them or not.

They are a danger to their customers because those individuals feel that they have gone to an expert who has their individual issue in hand and it’s being treated. When instead all they are doing is being taken advantage of and their medical needs are going unmet potentially worsening their condition. If you don’t do this then bully for you, but you’re clearly the minority. You have only to read the comments on this post to see all of the other folks who have had shady dealings with people in your profession. Or google it.

I’m sure chiropractic procedures have come a long way in the last hundred years, but the truth of the matter is they would have to considering chiropractic treatments were developed and defined by an inventor (Daniel D. Palmer) who was a new age healer who swore by the healing power of magnets and his ability to manipulate the immaterial spiritual essence that courses through our nervous system called “Innate intelligence”. Do you preach this to your customers? Do you wave magnets over people and tell them they are cured? Probably not, but there are those that do.

Ask yourself this; why would chiropractors need to redefine an orthopedic term to mean something else completely unless there was a plan to use it to bewilder and scare?

The cornerstone of modern chiropractic procedures and triage seems to be the subluxation. A bullshit term that they constantly define and redefine to be painfully vague, scary and completely unverifiable through any other means.

An orthopedic subluxation is a partial dislocation of a joint and as such is extremely bad and completely verifiable through image studies. A chiropractic subluxation is this theoretic problem that isn’t visible on any image study or remotely verifiable by any means other than apparently to make people stand on scales to check their weight or check to see if one leg is longer than another..etc.. Oh and to take the “doctors” word for it that you desperately need his help!

Its bullshit. It’s complete bullshit. You know it and I know it.

So, what about subluxations? How often have you told a customer that they have a subluxation? Because if you have ever said it, even once, you are a fraud. Period.

If you aren’t one of those DC’s then fine you’re one of the good ones.

“As for homeopathy, if you don’t like it and don’t believe in it, just like Chiropractic, don’t go.”

Here we go again, you have to “believe” in this treatment for it to work.

As I said above, that’s not medicine.. If I don’t believe in penicillin or Advil, it still works.. Yet for some reason for me to get any benefit out of your chiropractic treatments or homeopathy preparations I have to “believe”?

Requiring blind faith in some treatment for it to work is no different than what extreme religious faiths and cults do with their faith healing. It’s absolutely no different. Any and all perceived or actual benefits can be entirely explained by the placebo effect or the bodies own ability to heal itself with time. I just find it interesting how many homeopaths or chiropractors will be more than happy to take credit (and charge) for said results.

In my very first comment I stated; “I’m willing to concede that there are likely some chiropractors that aren’t complete fakes. But the methods they employ MUST be radically different than the ones I have seen so far.”

And that still holds true, but it’s apparent to me and those who seem to agree with me through this post and through countless others that the vast majority of the chiropractors out there are frauds with no more noble intent than to bilk the next sucker out of some money.

I am not a one man crusade out to crush a profession. There seems to be a rather large number of shady chiropractors out there as is evidenced by all the similar stories to mine, maybe instead of arguing with me you should urge those folks to fix their image and stop making your profession look bad..

I find it interesting that instead you seem to prefer trying to make me change my tune than to make them change theirs.

Allegations of MDs against DCs is a huge deal whether or not you are “seeing it.” LOL There are blogs, papers, hell, even pamphlets and even billboards that M.D.s have posted about the “dangers of Chiropractic” that make people fearful of us, but that’s really not important to our current argument.

I have a couple of thing for you to think about.
1. I use a radiology center to do all of my x-ray/MRI because I choose not to invest in the equipment when I can use theirs down the street. When I send a patient there I get a report from an M.D. radiologist as well as a Chiropractic radiologist. The M.D.s report is usually about a paragraph and the D.C.s is about a page or more. A patient came in because he has shoulder pain radiating from his neck and numbness in his tongue. I sent him for xray and the D.C.s report described in great detail the surgery, knew that the surgery was to correct a Chiari malformation and suggested the patient return for MRI bc with that surgery and considering the symptoms he was having, he was concerned because some patients develop a cavity in their spinal cord after this particular issue which can put them in a wheelchair as a paraplegic within a few years. The M.D. didn’t so much as mention the “hardware” still left from the surgery he had on his skull and 1st vertebrae. Now tell me who the “quack” is in this situation? This Chiropractor quite literally saved this guy’s life as he knows it because if we had just had the M.D.s report this could have turned into a reversible situation but he can now get it taken care of.

2. I was actually supposed to be an entering freshman at UT Southwestern medical school and even had all of my financial aid approved and ready to go until I had a run-in with a neurologist that completely changed my thinking. I had dizzy spells and headaches and after a CT, MRI, and MRA with this neurologist, I was told that I “just have migraines” like my mother and that I needed to take 2 different kinds of medications with extensive lists of side effects in order to control them. I disagreed as I had done my own research and suggested the possibility of something called cerebral pseudotumor which the doc disagreed over and over again. I tore up the prescriptions and went to my Chiropractor. He went over the radiology reports from the 3 scans I’d had and pointed out that even the radiologist had listed several things that were “congruent with cerebral pseudotumor and needed to be followed up clinically.” The neurologist didn’t even see this statement because he didn’t even LOOK at my reports. The Chiropractor made some suggestions to help my problem naturally and, guess what? It worked!!! I decided that I didn’t even want to have access to medicine because I wanted to challenge myself to treat everything as naturally as possible. I called up UTSW and told them to cancel my financial aid and called Parker college. Who’s the quack? I shouldn’t even have to ask…

The thing is there are “quacks” in all areas. There are crappy Chiropractors, crappy Dentists, crappy Physical therapists, and even some crappy Medical doctors. I could go on an on especially with stories from when I worked in the hospital, but I have a patient on his way for a follow-up who was scheduled for surgery to fuse C4-5-6 but cancelled because after 3 treatments Chiropractic has reduced his pain by about 75% and eliminated the numbness and tingling in his right arm. But that could not have been with my help, because I don’t do anything right??!! I am just some dumb Chiropractor with a sub-par education! LOL

As for homeopathy, if you don’t like it and don’t believe in it, just like Chiropractic, don’t go! LOL A little colloidal silver and one homeopathic remedy and my daughter’s bilateral eye infection was gone in less than 24 hours. I’m in! Medical doctor would have given us an antibiotic which also would have worked but I prefer not to use those unless absolutely necessary because those are abused so much that their effectiveness is going down the toilet slowly but surely hence the danger of MRSA in hospitals. But to each is own. If you like popping pills from your M.D., then by all means, do it!

I have really enjoyed our little argument run we’ve had. I don’t remember how I can across your blog. I wasn’t looking for anything like this, just came upon it by accident. The funny thing is that as much as you are trying to discredit me and my profession, it’s actually making me stronger because if someone puts me on the spot with an argument similar to any of yours I can recall things that I said to you quickly as it’s fresh in my brain and debunk their arguments very effectively. LOL Maybe I’ll just crash more blogs if I find any similar or create one of my own. Haha!

Happy blogging, Jason!

Thank you James.

More over, all MD’s are required by their individual state to participate in ongoing education to make sure their skills stay sharp and that their knowledge is current. They are required to attend yearly classes, in-service training, and seminars. The simple fact of the matter is, as a MD you are never done with school.

Each state varies with the requirements and schooling, though not by a lot as I understand it.

So suddenly that 3 year degree isn’t all that impressive.. I don’t mean to take anything away from you as it sounds like you worked very hard to get the degree, but I question the value.

Either way, the above explains why your raw comparison of curriculum doesn’t even mean anything.. its apples vs oranges.

As to your allegation that MD’s are going around spreading vicious rumors about how dangerous chiropractic is, I’m not seeing it. Is there a danger, sure.. there is danger in anything.. but aside from the odd stroke warning there doesn’t seem to be a huge outcry from MDs defaming DCs or their practices.

Interesting that the opposite isn’t true.

As to Homeopathy.. OH dear god — Are you serious? Have you done any research what so ever as to what Homeopathy is and how it came about?

For a good chuckle, watch this video of James Randi explaining all about Homeopathy and then seriously do some research and reconsider.. He’s 100% truthful and honest.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U

Long story short: Samuel Hahnemann during the medical dark ages (a couple hundred years ago) called himself a doctor, prepared “medicine” of his own invention following his four absurd rules and sold it to people for profit.. He was a snake oil salesman.. Hrmm isn’t that exactly what Daniel Palmer did with his “innate intelligence”..

And you are totally missing the point of my argument about insurance. Medical doctors try to say that Chiropractic is dangerous, yet our malpractice insurance is significantly lower. My husband’s car insurance is significantly more expensive than mine because he has so many speeding tickets. He is more likely to wreck his car or hurt himself of someone else. He’s higher risk, hence the higher insurance. That was my point.

The are lots of people that have had awesome results from Chiropractic care. People who were told they needed surgery, avoided surgery and are now pain-free. People crippled by headaches are no longer getting headaches. On the other hand there are some that need medical care and are simply not going to get better with Chiropractic alone. I personally choose to use a medical doctor that practices homeopathy on the rare occasion that my family needs medical attention. He doesn’t give the mainstream drugs like all the rest of them do, he uses homeopathic remedies and diet to treat his patients but he’s effective just like myself and colleagues are effective especially with many musculoskeletal issues . Some D.C.s believe that Chiropractic can treat absolutely any issue. I’d have to say I disagree, but google something about Chiropractic helping and you will find millions of success stories whether or not you choose to believe it. If you don’t like Chiropractic, the solution is simple: don’t go see a Chiropractor! Hahaha!

“Real honest medical care,” HAHAHAHAHA!! If you are up for it, I got two videos for you. Food Matters and The Business of Being Born. We’ll see what you think about “real honest medical care” then, my angry friend! Happy blogging!

First off; You link a chiropractic website as proof that chiropractors are some how more educated and know more than real medical doctors. It’s propaganda, pure and simple. The website is owned by a chiropractor.. Hrmm.. More over, there aren’t any such MD websites that countermand this bold (and stupidly false) statement because they don’t need them.

Medical doctors not only know more, but do more for you and they have no need to prove it through propaganda or shenanigans.. Chiropractors do, and do so constantly because they know their image is shady as hell..

( What makes it seem so shady? I dunno maybe everyone’s bad experiences with the profession or people with a 2 year degree coming along making bold statements about how much more they know than MD’s all while demanding to be called Doctor.. Just saying.. )

To say that the school you went to covers anything more thoroughly than a medical school is down right ludicrous.. What school is it? How long did you attend? What’s the normal course length to graduate as a DC there? What was your courses and specific field of study? How many hours did you study Chemistry? How many hours did you put into X-Ray.. etc.. Go on answer, lets put your claims to the test.. I call bullshit and doubt I’ll hear from you again on the matter.

As to malpractice insurance, your argument is sort of like saying it costs less to insure a Ford Escort than it does a Mercedes SLS therefore the Ford Escort is clearly better.. huh? Of course medical insurance is more expensive. Medical insurance has to be high because many of the procedures that they do can be invasive and risky.

That’s because medical doctors ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING!!

Name one thing that a chiropractor does that is as invasive as say; Surgery. Removing an appendix can be risky and can’t be fixed by chiropractic methods no matter what some douche bags say. (I found a link but I refuse to give him the hits.. just google it.)

So to that point, I will agree with you; Chiropractic exams and treatments aren’t very risky at all!! In fact I would say you’re at more risk driving to the chiropractors office, than actually being treated. But then thats because they don’t do anything. They massage you a little, maybe pay attention to you for a few minutes, poke you and prod you, and charge you for the good feelings and CO2 you just got.. They didn’t do anything other possibly enable the placebo effect.

The risky part with any chiropractic “treatment” is and always has been the notion that the “care” you just got is supposed to cure something that is really very wrong and that for which you should have sought real honest medical care.

As far as education goes, Check this out:

[ Removing the link. I don't want to give these quacks the hits. ]

The school I went to covers Anatomy, Physiology, Chemistry, Diagnosis, X-ray and Orthopedics in WAY more detail than med schools. And Med schools cover Pathology, Ob/Gyn, and Psychiatry WAY more than Chiro school. The differences are to be expected due to the nature of our work.

As for safety of a Chiropractor, some may find it interesting to know that a Chiropractor’s malpractice insurance is OVER 5 TIMES LESS than any medical doctor’s (at minimum). Insurance premiums are directly related to risk (hence the reason our car insurance is so high due to my speed demon husband) so it can be assumed that seeing a Doctor of Chiropractic is over 5 times less risky than seeing a medical doctor. Just saying…

I’d go see a doctor, and then a lawyer.. It’s quite possible she actually made you worse or at the very least did nothing but bilk you out of your hard earned cash all in the name of “curing you”..

It’s amazing to me.. How can these people live with themselves?

After having me stand in front of a mirror and move in certain ways, making various observations and comments, she had me lie face down on a table. She pressed on various points on my spine, asking me which of them felt “tender.” I didn’t understand what she meant, as everything on my back feels tender. So she pressed my hand, and said that I should feel no more than I felt when she pressed my hand. But the spine is where the nervous system is, I thought, so you’re always going to have more tenderness there than on your hand. But I tried to answer her as well as I could. As she went up my back to my neck I would answer more in the affirmative, that one disc or another was tender, and she rewarded me with, “Good, you’re getting the hang of it.” I thought her method of testing would be more scientific than this, for instance, an x-ray or computer imaging or something. But she merely wrote down my answers to what felt “tender,” some of which might have been arbitrary, and marked down which vertebrae they corresponded to.

The she held one arm up while tapping on my wrist. She also touched and brushed me on various parts of my body very lightly. She made verbal assertions as she did this: “You definitely have a virus…you live through other people- you need for others to be happy before you can be happy – this is a problem mostly in the workplace…” etc. Then she took a bottle of pills and held it against my stomach, all the while holding and tapping my wrist. “No, you don’t need these…” Another bottle of pills: “Three times a day.” Yet another: “Three times a day.” After that she used that activator machine and clicked on my face near my sinuses, which actually hurt quite a bit, then did some adjustments. She pulled both my ears out until they made sickening popping sounds: “It shouldn’t make a sound like that. It means you have a kink in your Eustachean tube. Now it’s straightened out.” (I later looked it up and I could find nothing in medical literature whatsoever about the existence of kinks in the Eustachean tube). Then she cracked my neck one way, and then the other. (OUCH)! Afterwards she said, “Well, we’ve done a lot today, doing any more would be too much for you. We adjusted your neck and your ears, we cleared viruses…” I was astonished. “You mean, you were able to clear viruses just by that tapping you were doing?” Her reply: “Well, basically, when you have a virus your body shuts down, so what I did was talked to your body and let it know the virus is there, so it can take care of it.” I said, as credulously as I could, “Oh, I see.”

Then she had me sit in a complimentary aqua detox foot bath, where you soak your feet in water in a machine for 30 minutes, or until the water turns black. The receptionist came in and said, “Oh, all that black is from smoking, or from living with second hand smoke.” I said “I don’t smoke and I’m never around second hand smoke.” She looked flustered and then said, “Well, then maybe it’s just pollution. And the orange is from your liver.” The “doctor” then wanted to know whether I would complete the full 6 session aqua detox at $50 a pop, and seemed cross when I said no, not right now. (The same foot detox machine she uses in her office can be bought on Amazon for $150, and 6 sessions in her office would have cost $300). The machine claims to detoxify your body, but has mostly been proven to be a scam. All it did was make my feet very clean.

While paying, the receptionist scheduled another visit for a few days later, and charged me for the two bottles of pills. I looked at one bottle – oregano capsules – and thought, what the heck, I know oregano is supposed to good for the immune system, so I’ll try it. But the other was for an antioxidant vitamin. I said to the receptionist, “I don’t know if I need these, I already take a vitamin supplement.” The chiropractor overheard me and said, “Well does your vitamin contain zinc? It’s well -documented that zinc helps with viruses.” I said “I don’t know.” She asked, “did you take your vitamin today?” I replied, “yes.” She rejoined sternly, “well, obviously you don’t get enough zinc, because your body tested for it.” I didn’t want to argue, so I bought the expensive little bottle of pills. Her voice had so much authority when she said that I tested for it. What was the test? That thing she did where she whooshed the bottle over my stomach and felt the vibes? (When I got home I saw that my multivitamin actually has more zinc than her supplement).

She scheduled me the next day for an acupuncture visit in the same office. When I ran into her in the waiting room, I asked her if she really thought my vertigo was related to my neck. She said, “Of course, it’s from years of injury from having bad posture.” (I had told her myself the day before that I thought I had neck damage from years of bad posture). She added, “That’s why you have a dowager’s hump.” After I finished my acupuncture treatment, which left a terrible black bruise under one eye, I went home and Googled “dowager’s hump,” and found that a dowager’s hump is an advanced state of osteoarthritis that leaves old women with hunchbacks. It is a real medical condition that can’t be reversed as there is so much bone loss, which never occurs in people of my age. It is however related to something called a “thoracic hump” which younger people do get, but which is a VISIBLE hump on the back from bad posture (there is no visible hump on my back).

I cancelled my next appointment with her after this, and will not be going back. Aside from the high cost of the first visit (the first visit is $165, whereas followup treatments are $55), my vertigo seems to have gotten considerably worse. I now have a new symptom, which is a fluttering inside my ear which sounds like a moth trying to get out. I looked up this symptom and it’s called tinnitus and is a result of vestibular damage. I’ve had my vertigo for two months now and never until now suffered tinnitus, which is a potential side effect of an inner ear infection and can lead to permanent deafness. I’m sure it was a result of damage that occurred when she pulled my ears. My neck pain is also worse, so bad that now I can’t sleep and sometimes actually cry out in pain just when turning my head on the pillow. Would subsequent visits fix all that? I don’t know, but after the careless way in which she pulled on my ears, having no idea whether it would damage them further or not, I’m afraid of her and don’t want to find out.

As a side note, I was not surprised by her shenanigans with passing the pills over my stomach, because two people I know had already told me stories about their chiropractors using this method to prescribe medications and treatment. It’s called “applied kinesiology,” and apparently a large number of chiropractors today use it. I wanted to add this story because no one yet had talked about this method, which more than anything else seems like a witch-doctor sort of practice.