Confessions of a Quackbuster

This blog deals with healthcare consumer protection, and is therefore about quackery, healthfraud, chiropractic, and other forms of so-Called "Alternative" Medicine (sCAM).

Sunday, December 18, 2005

ChiroPlot: the scheme to scam the competition.

ChiroPlot: the scheme to scam the competition.

Summary:
- The chiropractic profession (not necessarily individual DCs) has a Lebensraum politic, in other words it needs to steal customers from others in order to survive. It simply wishes to bury the competition. All talk of cooperation is a smokescreen.

***

The chiropractic agenda is no longer a secret. That agenda is to reserve all spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) for itself, by denying others - most notably Physical Therapists, but also including MDs and DOs - the right to use it at all for any reason. Regardless of its success or failure in its attempts, the agenda remains the same, and it will continue to pursue it until it either succeeds or the profession is forced to lower its ambitions in order to manage to survive at all.

Their agenda is a uniquely greedy one. They not only wish to reserve the use of SMT for their own illegitimate purposes, they wish to deny others the right to use it for legitimate purposes. Unfortunately, in their zeal to reserve a niche that is uniquely their own, they don't stop there.

What they are attempting to do can be better understood by using an illustration, so let's substitute the word "language" for the phrase "SMT":

What they wish to do is to reserve a specific dialect of a certain "language" for themselves. The "language" is spoken by several other groups. The others would have no objection, if chiropractic didn't also demand that no one else spoke the "language" at all. They are not content with simply using the dialect themselves, but are quite ambitious and greedy.

The "language" is SMT, and it is spoken by MDs, DOs, PTs and DCs. It's a very old "language", since manipulation has been practiced for thousands of years, long before D.D. Palmer claimed to receive his chiropractic concepts - in spiritistic seances - from the long dead medical physician, Dr. Jim Atkinson.

You see, not many are aware that the founder of chiropractic claimed to receive his knowledge from "privileged communication with [a] supernatural source. D.D. Palmer learned of chiropractic principles from spirit Dr. Jim Atkinson (Palmer, 1910)."
http://www.sherman.edu/research/rsch510/FaultyLogic-in-Chiro.pdf

He claimed to have "received chiropractic from the other world":
http://www.geocities.com/healthbase/chiro-religion.html

The practice of chiropractic is legally defined as "manual manipulation of the spine to correct a subluxation". Manual manipulation is not what is unique about chiropractic. It is the *reason* for manipulating that is unique, and that part is in the last four words - "to correct a subluxation."

MDs, DOs, PTs and DCs use SMT for various reasons.

Only DCs do it "to correct a subluxation."

Their intention is to prevent MDs, DOs, PTs from using SMT for *all* reasons.

The lawyers representing the AMA, APTA, and AOA need to understand this matter.

Regarding subluxations, chiropractic's foremost historian has this to say:

".... when we insist upon attributing beneficial clinical outcomes to reduction of the subluxation complex, we engage in dogma. The subluxation complex is a potentially testable hypothetical construct. It may have great clinical significance, or none, or something somewhere in between. We don't know; we haven't done our homework. The validity (or lack thereof) of the traditional chiropractic lesion has not been adequately explored (far from it). Dr. Riekeman acknowledges that "the hard questions in chiropractic have never been answered by science," but more to the point, they are rarely if ever asked. The president will query, "What is subluxation?" but he doesn't ask whether subluxation complex is real, meaningful, pr clinically useful. To do so would be to challenge the dogma of Palmer." -- Joseph Keating Jr.,PhD, Homewood Professor, Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College
http://www.chiroweb.com/archives/19/19/20.html

Manipulating a biotheological fiction is what chiropractic is all about, and chiropractors who don't do this aren't truly practicing "real" chiropractic, but are practicing something more akin to Physiotherapy, without being properly educated to do so.

The history of chiropractic is a tragic one. It is the story of a business enterprise based on privately owned schools. Their job has been to fool students into accepting belief in the chiropractic "subluxation". These students become chiropractors who in turn fool their patients into believing in this fiction. A belief in "subluxations" is the most fundamental element of the profession, and constitutes its uniqueness. "No subluxation, no chiropractic!"

Using the legal terminology that defines their profession, chiropractic leaders and their lawyers are constantly engaged in legal maneuvers and lawsuits designed to control, limit, and prosecute the members of other professions who use their rights to manipulate.

They do it even when the person in question has not performed a manipulation in an attempt "to correct a subluxation".

The President of the American Chiropractic Association has clearly described their intentions:

"While the ACA views the decision on physical therapists as a victory in itself, our fight is certainly not over. Nobody but a doctor of chiropractic is qualified to perform manual manipulation to correct a subluxation-not a medical doctor, not an osteopath. We will continue to pursue this lawsuit until we're assured that only doctors of chiropractic are allowed to provide this service to Medicare + Choice beneficiaries."

Since this statement is very deliberately well formulated, an elaboration of its true meaning and consequences is in order, and that can be found here:
http://www.geocities.com/healthbase/pedchiro.html

More reading:
http://quackfiles.blogspot.com/2005/12/appeals-court-overturns-adverse.html





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