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

The first diagnosed ‘atlas subluxation’ and predicted ‘paralysis in fifteen years’ if this problem was not treated. The second found many vertebrae ‘out of alignment’ and one hip ‘higher’ than the other. The third said that the woman’s neck was ‘tight’. The fourth said that misaligned vertebrae indicated the presence of ‘stomach problems’. All four recommended spinal adjustment on a regular basis, beginning with a frequency of twice a week. Three gave adjustments without warning — one of which was so forceful that it produced dizziness and a headache that lasted several hours.

Barrett’s study of chiropractors was neither exhaustive nor definitive, but his limited sampling did suggest that there is something rotten at the heart of the chiropractic profession. Chiropractors dealing with the same healthy individual could agree on neither the diagnosis nor which part of the spine was problematic — all that they could agree on was that regular chiropractic therapy was the solution. Perhaps this should not be surprising when we bear in mind that the underlying principles of chiropractic therapy, the notions of subluxations and innate intelligence, are meaningless.

In addition to all this, and even more worrying, is Barrett’s last sentence, which mentions that his undercover patient suffered ‘dizziness and a headache that lasted several hours’. This raises an important issue that we have not yet discussed, namely safety. Every medical treatment should offer the likelihood of benefit, but it will also, almost inevitably, carry a likelihood of side-effects. The key issue for patients is simple: does the likely extent of the benefit outweigh the likely extent of the adverse side-effects, and how does this risk— benefit analysis compare to other treatments? As we shall discuss below, the dangers of chiropractic therapy can be serious and in some cases life-threatening.

The dangers of chiropractic therapy

Often the first hazard encountered when visiting a chiropractor is undergoing an X-ray examination, which seems to be a routine procedure among many practitioners. A survey conducted across Europe in 1994 revealed that 64 per cent of patients received X-rays when visiting a chiropractor, and a survey of members of the American Chiropractic Association conducted in the same year suggested that 96 per cent of new patients and 80 per cent of returning patients were X-rayed. Although many chiropractic publications explicitly advise against the routine use of X-rays, these surveys reveal an almost cavalier approach to a technology that does carry a risk of causing cancer.

It is estimated that on average medical X-rays are responsible for 14 per cent of our annual exposure to radiation. Much of the remaining 86 per cent comes from natural sources such as radon gas seeping up through the ground. The increased risk of cancer due to X-rays is small, but it is not negligible. According to a paper published in the Lancet in 2004, roughly 700 of the 124,000 new cancer cases diagnosed each year in the UK are due to medical X-rays. Although X-rays therefore account for 0.6 per cent of new cancer cases, they continue to be used widely in medicine because they offer tremendous benefits in terms of diagnosing and monitoring patients. In other words, conventional doctors are willing to use X-rays because the benefits outweigh the potential harm, but at the same time they minimize the use of X-rays, employing them only when there is a clear reason to do so.

In contrast, chiropractors may X-ray the same patient several times a year, even though there is no clear evidence that X-rays will help the therapist treat the patient. X-rays can reveal neither the subluxations nor the innate intelligence associated with chiropractic philosophy, because they do not exist. There is no conceivable reason at all why X-raying the spine should help a straight chiropractor treat an ear infection, asthma or period pains. Most worrying of all, chiropractors generally require a full spine X-ray, which delivers a significantly higher radiation dose than most other X-ray procedures.

This raises the question of why so many chiropractors are so keen to X-ray their patients. Partly they are blindly following a corrupt methodology and a bankrupt philosophy that has been passed down through the decades, while ignoring the latest advice from experts. On top of this, it is important to remember that X-raying patients is a very lucrative part of any chiropractic business.