A chiropractor responds....

Breakfast TV had a chiropractor on to reply. Here's the video, followed by my responses.

1. ...based on two premises: body can heal itself and the nervous system controls the body

My response: Yes, but these premises do not demonstrate that chiropracty works

2. chiropracty...not based on this belief that energy flows....

My response: Yes it is, it is the basic underlying premise! Search the internet and you will find hundreds of examples eg. http://www.chirohealth.org/pdf/WantEnergy.pdf. Daniel Palmer, the founder of chiropracty developed a theory of "innate intelligence", which acts as the "body's guiding energy", with blockages leading to disease.

3. not every asthma case is going to respond to adjusting

My response: Implies that it works for some patients. No it doesn't
http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/cgi/content/abstract/99/4/192

4. he didn't say where (700 cases of severe problems) came from

My response: Of course I did not list of all the references in a 4 minute live TV interview. I referred to my paper last year and the Andrew Gilbey survey - a google search would quickly find my sources and they are on my previous blog post.

5. risk of stroke 1 in 5.8 million

My response: Cherry-picking of the data - the range in the literature is from 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 5.8 million. See http://www.library.nhs.uk/cam/ViewResource.aspx?resID=269229&tabID=289&catID=10844 for more info and the references.

6. risk of stroke same from a chiropractor as a GP

My response: This is the study, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18204390. It has been widely discredited, see here for a good summary http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=362 and here for another http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=170

7. chiropractors safest for spine adjustments

My response: Yes, this is probably true, but not the point. The point is whether spine adjustments are beneficial

8. 100-200,000 admissions to hospital in USA each year due to painkillers

My response: I can not find any papers to back this up, however, I'll happily concede that anti-inflammatory drugs can cause gastric bleeding and other side effects. It seems very high though and would mean that 1 in every 200 admissions was due to a reaction to painkillers. I doubt it. However, this is part of the risk/benefit considerations for any treatment and does not change my overall comments: chiropractors may be OK for bad backs, but nothing else; there are many reports of severe adverse effects from chiropractic neck manipulation; many chiropractors claim to be able to treat non-musculoskeletal diseases when the evidence shows they clearly can not; many chiropractors call themselves doctor, which is misleading, if not illegal.