The story (which apparently first appeared in local Georgia news outlets) has been reported in venues including The Independent, Newsweek and Science-Based Medicine.
Did you miss seeing this comprehensive review posted earlier?
If (as chiropractic apologists have suggested), simple activities of daily living including turning your head too quickly or “horseplay” put you at risk of multiple arterial dissections in the neck and stroke, then maybe having your neck forcibly wrenched by a chiropractor should be added to the list of no-nos.
You are not, and I wonder what kind of subliminal wishes we are expressing here. Still I kept on reading for over 40 posts, despite never having heard of chiropractors in Europe. Fascinating resemblances to homeopathy.
Actually, the ad was back in the 1990s, long before Gibson’s 2006 drunken “sugar tits” tirade.
I remember petitions in health food stores, which were part of the PR campaign to keep food supplements free from government regulation. Such regulation would have prevented companies from making claims about such snake oil unless they could show clinical proof that they worked.
We had a very old horse named Mac, who had many geriatric issues. My gf was thinking about contacting a guy who does chiropractic and acupuncture on horses, but I convinced her to hold off.
A couple of weeks later Mac was unusually perky. I pointed out to my gf that had she used the chiro/acupuncture guy she would be crediting him with the improvement.
My son and his fiance are PTs. At least at their school they spent a lot of time being told that while sometimes necessary, messing with the neck is extremely fraught. And they had to go ahead and practice the various techniques on their classmates. No one ended up hurt.
You need to go back and read more of the thread that you missed, or have ignored.
That article covered 64 cases that were reported in the literature. Unreported instances, particularly in people who suffered subacute arterial dissections as a result of neck manipulation and only developed stroke after a longer interval, would be missed in such an analysis. In an older person who suffers a stroke, it’s highly doubtful the treating physician will ask about whether the patient saw a chiropractor recently, nor is the patient likely to volunteer that information. Routine imaging may not detect arterial dissection in the neck.
Lastly, even “rare” catastrophic events as a result of a medical or pseudomedical intervention are unacceptable when there is no established clinical benefit. For example: a small risk of permanent kidney damage associated with use of a powerful antibiotic may be acceptable if the patient is otherwise likely to die of sepsis caused by an organism resistant to other antibiotics. A small risk of paralysis and death due to chiropractic neck cracking is not acceptable.
Sure, but there are like 70,000 DC in the USA, and most do 4+ clients a day, so are you telling me that there are like 200,000 people paralyses every single day, or 60 million a year? So, it is very very rare.
Lots of people do crap that is harmful, jut because they like to- No established benefit to smoking cigs, yet over 400000 Americans die every year, plus boating accidents and the like, plus about 16,000 die each year from prescription opioids. Do you think the number of people paralyzed due to Chiro gets even a tenth of that? Maybe not even a hundredth.
So, like I say, it is plausible, but can you link to a medical professional saying it is the case here? I am just being cynical.
Why are you yapping about opioids, cigarettes and boating accidents? They’re a drop in the bucket compared to the 9 million people who die of hunger and related causes each year, the 10 million who die of cancer or the 17 million who are killed by infectious diseases annually? How dare you talk or post about trivial problems when famine, disease and war have not been conquered?
Are you getting a glimmer about how utterly inane such “logic” is?
I have seen neck arteries damaged, with symptoms beginning immediately after a chiropractor did a procedure on her neck. She presented to the ER half an hour later.
I am willing to agree it likely does not occur very often. Still, I would not let a chiropractic do anything to my upper spine.
Aside from generalized fantasies about relieving imaginary subluxations (which can’t be seen on x-rays), a common chiro claim about the supposed benefits of neck cracking has to do with a single study about 15 years ago, which reported lowered blood pressure in a small group of patients who received a specialized procedure purporting to readjust the atlas vertebra at the top of the spine.
Very few chiros perform such a procedure, which is supposed to relieving “pinching” at the base of the brain (strong smell of woo here). And the study only went out 8 weeks, with no indication that the reported BP reduction lasted longer. Still, it might sound impressive to patients hearing comments like this (via Medscape):
"“We are not doctors. We are spinal engineers,” Dickholtz* says. “We use mathematics, geometry, and physics to learn how to slide everything back into place.”
Um, right.
*I first read the name as “Dickhead”, which is probably mean.
And why does my employer, which writes a lot of workers’ compensation insurance, have to pay for it. Routinely. When i first started working here, 25 years ago, i was shocked to discover that we routinely pay for chiropractic services for back pain. We even track which ones we think are legit and which ones we think over-treat.
The chiropractic lobby is quite strong in many states, and lobbied state governments to mandate health insurance plans to cover chiropractic treatment. Many state governments passed such laws.
For us non-medicos, can you dumb down an explanation of what you can do for a patient in that situation? I assume the arteries aren’t bleeding at the time?
I think it’s weird, but our insurance covers my wife’s bills whenever she sees her chiro. Kind of makes you wonder what other kind of stuff gets paid for. I wonder if acupuncture or hypnotism are ever covered?
