sarahmichigan | Follow up on chiropractic post

I made some assertions in an earlier post about the flaws of chiropractic but didn't really back them up with credible sources.

I know many people, including people on my LJ list, who have gotten relief from chiropractic, and it's hard to argue with personal experience. However, I wonder how much of that is the placebo effect, or the effect of having a good working relationship with your chiropractor.

I remain unmoved about several of my criticisms about mystical mumbo-jumbo being passed off as science, concerns about chiropractic being used to treat non-spinal issues, and my assertion that other more mainstream methods could probably work equally well for back and neck conditions.

Here's a link to a website first launched in 1999 in order to explain the concerns some faculty members had with the proposal for York University in Canada to offer a Doctor of Chiropractic degree in cooperation with the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College. This proposal was rejected by the Faculty of Pure and Applied Science.

Their criticisms, in part were:

1. "chiropractic" is not synonymous with "spinal manipulation." Put another way, chiropractors are not the only therapists who perform spinal manipulations. There are conventional therapists who also treat musculoskeletal conditions with spinal manipulation.

2. chiropractic techniques, even for low-back pain, have not been validated.
only a small minority of chiropractors are classified as "scientific" according to recent surveys of Canadian chiropractors.

3. a majority of chiropractors would treat non-musculoskeletal conditions even where there is no evidence for efficacy.

4. chiropractors continue to use x-rays to detect "subluxations," even though subluxations have never been demonstrated to exist let alone identified as the cause of low-back pain.

The full text can be found here:

http://www.ndir.com/chiro/scientific.html