Sacromento Woo Death?

Typical of the unlicensed ones? Absolutely.

Typical of the licensed? That's where it gets hard to tell. There are these honest ones out there who have spoiled it for those of us who like their woo clearly labeled. They had to go and study real medicine and treat sports injuries and the like instead of throwing people's necks around. Not that I object to them being honest about medicine. I just wish they'd be honest about not being chiropractors.

How to know whether you've got one of the quacks? Tell them you're short of breath. If they say they can fix it, run.

Certainly pieces of the skeletal system can become dislocated, which causes pain; and putting them back where they belong relieves it. That much, at least, ought to be straightforward enough, with relatively little reason to doubt.

I've only ever used a chiropractor a couple of times for that sort of treatment. After having a bike accident or some other thing that kinked my back, receiving a well-placed crunch and being able to walk away from the appointment pain-free, it's pretty obvious what was wrong, what the doctor did to fix it, and whether it works.

Treatment of other ailments through skeletal adjustment, not so much. I don't even know what they claim they can fix.

That said, however, using this fellow as evidence to discredit chiropractry as a discipline is a little like using a mischievous kid with a chemistry set as evidence to discredit Monsanto.

This isn't the first case of death by chiro, and it won't be the last:

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/chirostroke.html

Lots of other good articles on Chirobase too. I believe chiropractic to be woo because the theory underlying it is so very woo-riffic.

They claim all sorts of things. Here's a sample:

Dr. Rodney T. Hard's Nutritional Recommendations.

This fellow is also involved in some allergy cure scam where allergies are said to be the result of electrical disturbances in the body. The "cure" is to shock the patient at the right frequency (pet allergies are said to be one frequency, pollen allergies another, and so forth).

It's very unsettling to know that a lot of (most? all?) insurance companies pay benefits for this woo, and that most states legally sanction it.

For what it's worth, I once went to see an osteopath (or maybe an orthopod, I forget) for headaches I was having, a friend of the family. When I first went in, he asked why I seemed a little nervous. Now, being a big girl and all mature and stuff, I didn't want to come out and ask, "Am I going to have to be half naked in front of a friend of my Dad?" Instead, I went the nonchalant route: "I've never been to a chiro before."

I should have just been straightforward, because he was visibly insulted that I had made such a conflation.

He explained the difference and ended with, "Chiropractors are not doctors, they're quacks and they hurt people" and I've never repeated that mistake.

I stopped having the headaches though, after he straightened out my spine. If I ever have them again, I know where I'm going, and it ain't to a chiro.

Chiropractors. Gaak. My former significant other's mom (then in her early 80s) went through 9 months of hell with a chiro messing with her back until she had to go to the hospital with a heart problem and the docs there realized she had advanced osteoporosis. By that time she'd lost 6-7" in height, had two major bouts with kidney stones from all the excreted calcium, and dropped to 78 pounds on account of being in so much pain, she didn't have enough energy to eat.

fsck all chiropractors and the unicorns they rode in on.

Never been to a chiropractor, though having a cracked vertebrae and two crushed disks would seem to call for it. Never been to an accupuncturist either, nor an herbalist, nor a . . . . . well you get the idea. But I have many friends who use some or all of these services. And none of them has ever reported anything bad. In fact, I have a couple of close friends who medical treatments for long term illness have been greatly accelerated by the application of "non-Western" medicine. Sure, it's not a rigorous samples, but if various medical schools can teach these disciplines to compliment "traditional" medicine then perhaps there's something useful in them, and assigning them all to the Quacko bin isn't the appropriate response.

Philip, accelerated compared to what? It's an easy claim to make but very hard to test without much more advanced cloning technology than we currently have.

Science-Based Medicine had an excellent post on chiropractors and stroke several weeks ago: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=94.

Parts of the spine can become misaligned or dislocated, yes. But spinal subluxations (actual, painful, physical dislocation of the vertebrae) are nothing like the imaginary "vertebral subluxations" (supposed nerve blockages that cause body ailments) that chiropractors claim to treat. The principle of vertebral subluxation, upon which chiropractic was founded and continued to function, is pure woo. And that's not even touching the other woos that so often accompany chiropractic, like applied kinesiology.

Show me the papers, Philip. When there's research that adequately addresses confirmation bias in the anecdotal testimony, then we can stop calling them quacks and voodoo priests.

Until then, ... It certainly doesn't belong in a medical schools any more than "Power Crystals" or "Benny Hinn's Magic Whop on the Head"

Speaking of whom, have y'all seen this?

Man, that cracks me up. (The higher the volume, the funnier it is, btw...)

I was perusing your blog site and found that James posted comments about me on June 16, 2008 at 8:25 AM that were totally untrue. I treat allergy symptoms. I have never made a claim that I "cure" allergies. James claims that my treatment consists of shocking the patient at the right frequency. This is not true. Our treatments do not involve shock. He also said that it was "very unsettling to know that a lot of (most? all?) insurance companies pay benefits for this woo, and that most states legally sanction it". Well, he is wrong again. It is not "woo". We have an 85% success rate in reducing or eliminating the frequency of symptoms, the intensity of symptoms, and the longevity of the symptoms. Insurance companies do not pay for it. Patients gladly pay for treatments out of their pockets and are happy with the results. He could not have misconstrued the information on my website http://www.AllergyEraseSystem.com or any of my other sites because none of what he claims are on any of my sites.

It is a shame that James, who won't even use his whole name or cite his sources, was allowed to lie and besmirch my name and reputation. The site that he listed was a site about nutrition and that site is not active anymore. The site was about standard researched information about minerals, vitamins, essential fatty acids, and the like. It had nothing to do with allergies.