Hi Buddy,
Did you read my post?
Is the sun going to rise tomorrow morning? Or do we need a randomized, doubleblind, placebo, controlled study to prove it?
Or can you agree with me, based on your own experience over the years that tomorrow morning the chances are pretty good, and you would lay money on it, that it is going to happen?
So it is with people, all over the world, responding to chiropractic, who have disease processes in other bodily systems that have their origin in, to put it simply, a stuck bone in their spine.
In fact, anecdotal studies, where individual case studies are reported in the scientific literature, which is happening in the case of this blind man having his sight restored, have gained a good amount of credibility recently, as they should have, and are expanding the realm of the possible.
When I read Dr. Barrett's name in your post, I thought it was no wonder you have this view of chiropractic. Barrett is aligned with a very small group of chiropractors who limit themselves to the musculoskeletal aspect of chiropractic.
It is something like not admitting that there is ultraviolet and infrared light, only the visible light spectrum. With regards to Dr. Barrett, "there are none so blind as those who refuse to see."
That is fine.
The people who I mentioned in my previous post would scoff at this flat earth view of chiropractic. Their own direct experience trumps any scientific paper or so called expert.
It also depends on your definition of disease. I would agree with you that there are many disease processes that are not originated by a stuck bone in the spine.
But when they are, no amount of medical treatment is going to help them.
I agree with you that these days, the vast majority of what chiropractors ostensibly do is neuromusculoskeletal (NMS) but you see, it is the neuro part of that word that allows subluxation to be the originator of disease and ill health.
The originator of subluxation is physical, emotional and chemical stress. The main cause is untreated spinal injuries in children, which can commence with the birth process (if you think is only hard for the mother, why do you think the baby is crying?) and gets the degenerative arthritic ball rolling in their lives.
At some point, sooner or later, this disease reaches a point of development where it starts to generate symptoms of one type or another, not limited to musculoskeletal.
In fact, chronic degenerative arthritis is what I am treating in the spine, not the person's symptom complex. This is a disease process in itself.
So we educate people one at a time, as they come into our offices and get rid of any false ideas they may have been exposed to. Of course, some are so entrenched in their belief systems that they do not have the ability to think outside their mental box and look at things objectively. They have too much invested in being right, even when they are wrong.
To put it in perspective, Dr. Barrett has about 0% credibility with the vast majority of our profession.
You know, up until about 1995, chiropractic in all of its 100 years never helped any body with any thing according to the powers that be. But when the RAND corporation came out with their survey of all things low back pain and said that chiropractic was the most effective treatment for low back pain, all of a sudden we were on the map (for LBP, nothing else, not neck pain or headache).
We never helped a single soul before that (I am being facetious, of course), but this is the sillness we have had to put up with since the inception of our profession. We were quacks (unscientific cultist quacks, to quote the AMA directly, whose statement of purpose was "to first contain and then eliminate the profession of chiropractic in the United States").
Didn't happen. When something is true, no amount of negative spin can stop it forever.
So we chiropractors wait patiently for the public consciousness to catch up with the entire truth of the significance of chiropractic and its ability to help people.
It will happen. It is just a matter of time.
I hope you can consider the possiblity that this group you are getting your info from is not the last word on chiropractic.
Best wishes, yb.
