Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

If you visit a chiropractor and the problem is not resolved within six sessions, or there is no ongoing significant improvement within six sessions, then be prepared to stop treatment and consult your doctor for advice. Chiropractors have a reputation for lengthy and expensive treatments, as demonstrated by a survey in 2006 that monitored ninety-six patients with acute neck pain. Although the patients generally reported improvements, the treatments required twenty-four visits on average, and in two cases there were more than eighty treatment sessions. It is likely that the majority of these recoveries had little to do with the chiropractic intervention, but were largely the result of time and the body’s own natural healing processes.

Do not allow a chiropractor to become your primary healthcare provider, which might include preventative and maintenance treatments covering all health issues. In 1995, a survey showed that 90 per cent of American chiropractors considered themselves primary care providers, but they are rarely qualified to take on this role. Patients are often impressed by the fact that many chiropractors carry the title Doctor, but this does not mean that they have attended medical school. The title generally indicates Doctor of Chiropractic (DC), which merely means that a practitioner has completed a chiropractic course lasting four years.

Avoid chiropractors who rely on unorthodox techniques for diagnosing patients, such as applied kinesiology and the E-meter, which were described earlier. Such techniques are usually employed by straight chiropractors.

Check the reputation of your chiropractor before embarking on any treatment, because chiropractors are more likely than medical doctors to be involved in malpractice. According to a survey conducted in California in 2004, chiropractors were twice as likely as medical doctors to be the subject of disciplinary actions. Even more worrying, the incidence rate for fraud was nine times higher for chiropractors than for doctors, and the rate for sexual boundary transgressions was three times higher for chiropractors than doctors.

Last, but not least, try conventional treatments before turning to a chiropractor for back pain. They are generally cheaper than spinal manipulation and just as likely to be effective. There are also other reasons for following the conventional route, but we will come to these later in the chapter.

The advice above is based on serious and well-founded criticisms of some elements of the chiropractic community. For example, chiropractors, particularly in America, have earned a reputation for zealously recruiting and unnecessarily treating patients. Practice-building seminars are commonplace and there are numerous publications aimed at helping chiropractors find and retain patients. In many cases the emphasis seems to be placed on economics rather than healthcare: the chiropractor Peter Fernandez is the author of a five-volume series called Secrets of a Practice-Building Consultant, which starts with a volume boldly titled 1,001 Ways to Attract Patients and ends with How to Become a Million Dollar a Year Practitioner.

Many chiropractors are embarrassed by the zealous profiteering of their colleagues. For instance, G. Douglas Anderson, writing in Dynamic Chiropractic, has argued that the chiropractic movement needs a radical overhaul:

It is high time we admit there is nothing conservative, holistic or natural about endless care, creating addiction to manipulation, or making unsubstantiated, cure-all claims. On the contrary, an excellent argument can be made that the variety of tricks, techniques and claims still used by a large percentage of our profession to keep fully functional, asymptomatic people returning for care is fraudulent.

According to Joseph C. Keating, himself a chiropractor, the tendency to profiteer and mislead can be traced back to the founders of the chiropractic therapy, particularly B. J. Palmer: ‘Indeed, the profession, as a unified body politic, has never truly renounced the marketing and advertising excesses modelled by B. J. and many clinical procedures and innovations since are noteworthy for the extraordinary and unsubstantiated claims which are made for them.’ It seems that chiropractors are fond of manipulating their patients in both senses of the word.

Stephen Barrett, a US psychiatrist and medical writer, has been at the forefront of criticizing and exposing other shady aspects of chiropractic therapy. For example, he conducted a small experiment to see how four chiropractors would diagnose and deal with the same healthy patient, a twenty-nine-year-old woman: