HOW SAFE IS CHIROPRACTIC ?How safe is Chiropractic? - could it be dangerous?
There has been much rhetoric about the safety of Chiropractic. What is important is the relative safety. Almost no treatment for any condition can be described as totally safe. Even drugs as common place as aspirin and anti-inflammatories cause a significant number of deaths every year, far in excess of a stroke after a Chiropractic adjustment. Chiropractic causes very, very few deaths. Statisticians have shown that you have about the same chance of dying from a Chiropractic adjustment as from being struck by lightening while playing golf. It can happen, it does happen, but it is very rare. Less than one in a million chance, and that makes the Chiropractic adjustment one of the very safest treatments.
In comparison, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources stated that on average, 17.14% of the 700 000 physicians in the United States caused one accidental death per year. Actuarial reportsMore important than all the rhetoric is the report of actuaries, the mathematicians who decide what insurance premiums doctors should pay. Their calculations concerning how the safety of chiropractic reveal that Chiropractors should pay insurance premiums of approximately $2000 per year. Some medical doctors pay over $100 000 per year in premiums. There are very few successful cases against Chiropractors. Is Chiropractic totally safe? No, it’s not, but it’s a great deal safer than taking anti-inflammatories or going for surgery. They too, however, have their merits and your Chiropractor may sometimes refer you for drugs or surgery.
How safe is Chiropractic? Pretty, damn safe! However, you can fairly frequently experience increased pain after the first few treatments. In fact there is some research suggesting that if you don't have some after-pain you may also not get much benefit from Chiropractic. But that's another story.
Dr Scott HaldemanDr Haldeman, medical neurologist and chiropractor, states that there have been 23 known cases of vertebral artery dissection in 10 years after a chiropractic adjustment of the neck. However, he is of the opinion that these dissections were probably in progress before the treatment, rather than caused by the manipulation. During this time 135 million cervical manipulations were given, a rate of less than 1 stroke after 6 million cervical adjustments.In comparison, 16 000 Americans died in one year from gastric hemorrhage, directly from taking NSAIDs, not including those who died from heart and other complications.
Conclusion: "HOW SAFE IS CHIROPRACTIC?"The only sensible conclusion is that chiropractic manipulation is a relatively, but not perfectly, safe procedure. There are no perfectly safe procedures.
The BONE and JOINT decade 2000-2010 World Health Organisation Task ForceThe Task Force, a multi-disciplinary research body, evaluated a 1000 studies on neck pain before coming up with a report addressing the question How safe is Chiropractic? for cervical spine conditions concluding with the the following statement:We analyzed a total of 818 cases of Vertebro Basilar Artery (VBA) stroke admitted to Ontario hospitals over a 9-year period (more than 100 million patient-years of observation) in answer to the question, HOW SAFE IS CHIROPRACTIC? has concluded that: VBA stroke is a very rare event and that the risk of VBA stroke associated with a visit to a chiropractor’s office appears to be no different from the risk of VBA stroke following a visit to a family physician’s office. VaccinationVaccination remains a thorn in the flesh of Alternative Healthcare, and I'm not aware of a strong statement confirming or denying the value of vaccination from mainline chiropractic. Fringe Chiropractic continues to condemn it.I was born into a Chiropractic family. Both my parents were chiropractors, and I was not vaccinated as a baby. I, together with eight other children who were vaccinated, very nearly died of diphtheria at nine months old, saved only by a combination of good nursing and chiropractic adjustments. Did they help ...? I believe so, though there is no research ... This month, in our small town in Holland, a healthy nine-year old boy died suddenly three days after a vaccination, resurrecting all the old fears. Thousands are now refusing to be vaccinated. In one week last three healthy children died within ten days of receiving a vaccination ... I am not abreast of all the facts, though I suspect at the end of the day, the enormous benefit to the majority, preventing the scourges of polio, small pox ... and many other diseases, should not be disgarded because of the side effects on a tiny minority. Like Chiropractic, do the enormous benefits of vaccination not vastly outweigh the occasional serious side-effects? Having said that, I personally do not recommend vaccination against non-serious diseases. Only recently a patient suffered a dreadful bout of influenza that lasted over a month after a 'flu injection. Worse, the most serious case of shingles that I have ever seen began shortly after a shingles vaccination. In the Spring of 2009, the Dutch minister of health announced that he has ordered enough vaccine to vaccinate every man, woman and child twice against Mexican Swine flu. I'm not convinced that I'll be queueing up for my jabs! How safe is Chiropractic? I suspect that death from vaccination is probably about as prevalent as stroke from a Chiropractic adjustment. Does that invalidate either?
The RATIONALE for the "Chiropractic Adjustment"Probably the biggest single medical critque of Chiropractic is not "HOW SAFE IS CHIROPRACTIC?" but that there is no scientific basis for the 'adjustment'. They may have been the case once ... but now there is a huge amount of basic science research confirming that fixated joints become arthritic much faster, and bombard the spinal cord with noxious input. Read more ...
INTERESTING LINKSTo go from HOW SAFE IS CHIROPRACTIC? to STROKE, - A short story by chiropractic Bernard Preston.Medicine is proposing the treatment of patients with diseases like MS with the ova of Helminths, worms. How safe is that TREATMENT OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM? More about Stroke Chiropractic. LEG PAIN DURING PREGNANCY CaseFile ... How the humble OLIVE helps prevent stroke. OLIVE GARDEN NUTRITION ... Olive Pate, so easy to make ... Go from HOW SAFE IS CHIROPRACTIC? to BERNARD PRESTON home page … Monthly Newsletter
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