The Chiropractic Section of the American Public Health Association had an active agenda at the annual meeting.
Symposia and scientific presentations were held. Handsome and charming Doctors of Chiropractic emphasized the Public Health benefits of a well accepted and integrated Chiropractic Professional Community. No doubt.
Is it alright if I ask what kind of scientific presentations? And wouldn’t bona fides be measured to some extent in a Public Health organization based on support of programs like vaccinations to prevent infectious diseases. My impression is that Chiropractors are often antagonistic to vaccines. Not a good public health program player attitude. They are good promoters for sure and certainly help people with sore backs many times.
http://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=56917
My stance is also rooted in personal experience. Maybe I got lucky and happened to walk into the office of the only intelligent, rational, ultra-right wing conservative chiropractor in the states. (He actually dialed our senator’s office and handed me the phone to ensure that I voiced my opposition to certain gun bills rather than take my word that I would call when I got home.) So when it comes down to it, in my experience your claims just aren’t true.
I’m not arguing that there aren’t any quacks out there, but to invoke the classic “tu quoque” fallacy, most of the quacks I’ve met were MDs that were too quick to jump to a pharmaceutical solution and too slow to investigate physical causes. I’ll admit I just like the idea of surgeons, physical therapist, osteopaths and chiropractors. They look for a root cause and permanent fix. I hate the trend towards lifetime prescriptions that I see in the MD community. Too many of my older friends and relatives have reached a point where half their medications are just treating side-effects of their other medications. A friend of my wife’s (classic urban legend opener, I know) was actually in a wheel chair for the better part of a year before a smart doctor caught on that her paralysis was caused by a drug interaction.
You know better than I do that the human body is a complicated machine. It seems that sales and marketing have more to do with most research than actual health concerns. I may lack humility, but I’d rather trust my own intellect than that of most other people I’ve ever met or heard of regardless of how many years they spent in college. As a result, I don’t trust any attempt to remove people’s ability to choose what’s best for themselves even if it means allowing people to make what is obviously (to me anyway) the wrong choice. I don’t buy the thimerosal/autism link, but I don’t see the point of the flu shot either. Grouping all vaccines together into a political movement distracts from the reality that all medications have specific pros and cons that must be addressed individually. Furthermore, if a manufacturer screws up and does cause injury, I don’t think they should be protected by the law and the medical community while their potential victims pay for the damages through taxation. It would seem that I could be called “anti-vaccine” for holding those opinions.
I’m sure there are some chiropractors that believe the thimerosal claims, but most of the “anti-vaccine” rhetoric I see them accused of has turned out to be honest discussion of the known risks and questioning of the tangible benefits in specific vaccines such as seasonal influenza. This is purely opinion now, but the “Chiropractors are anti-vaccine” charge sounds eerily similar to the “deniers are anti-science” charge. Even when I agree with someone, I start to mistrust them when they use propagandist techniques like marginalization and broad brush accusation. Words have power and semantics matter when it comes to politicized issues. I begin to wonder why many in the MD community don’t want the habit of questioning the multi-billion dollar vaccine industry to catch on.
Either way, I hope you don’t change your mind any time soon. I do look forward to the next debate. Your decades of experience in the industry are invaluable to an outsider like myself.
Well you made some good points, but before i tell my story, I’ll tell you a story.
My Brother did a General Surgery at Minnesota when they were one of the top surgical residencies, and he said he used to hate it when some surgeon would make rounds, they would put up their papers, and he would say–well, in my experience that’s just not true.
So here’s my experience, chiros get cultish and push food and supplements stuff and food fetishes and healthy living and such and they also like to place themselves in opposition to mainstream medicine–kind of like we’re more natural.
and they work on the areas where medicine is a little too too.
so my experience is that the chiro community may officially not be anti vaccine, but in practice they are a source of a lot of the opposition and many office chiros are into the anti medical deal that includes the voodoo of holistic medicine and that includes a liberal dap of antivaccine hocum.
that’s what i have seen and that’s my story and i’m sticking to it.
no links to show–just like those old guy surgeons who used to frustrate my brother.
I will tell you that now that I am approaching the 43rd anniversary of my graduation from medical school and can recall many times when initial enthusiasm and the consensus disappeared with time.
That’s why i like your attitude GHO5T but i will continue to put up opinions without proper citations. Too lazy is my excuse. You might say–too arrogant and not humble enough. You’re probably right. i am old enough to be arrogant with a good dash of humility. I kind of enjoy not knowin the answers to everything–it’s easier.
You are a much more methodical and compulsive researcher than me when you are on the trail–i like that.
You didn’t really think I was going to let a chiropractor article go by, did you? It’s kind of our thing now.
I’m all for vaccination. When I found out that my kids didn’t have to go through chicken pox like I did, I was excited. That excitement didn’t stop me doing my due diligence on the risk/benefit assessment, though. I appreciate having the right to see the data for myself and come to an intelligent decision free from the coercion of a bunch of people who, at best, are lawyers not doctors.
I can’t speak for the personal opinions of all chiropractors, but when I searched the official website of the American Chiropractic Association and the International Chiropractors Association I was unable to find any explicitly anti immunization policies. Supporting the individual’s right to decline vaccination is a few steps away from claiming vaccinations cause mysterious mental illnesses. After a bit of digging I found that the AMA also seems to support an individual’s right to decline for personal reasons. My take-away is that the AMA and the ACA publicly espouse similar views on vaccinations in general.
Given that the AMA had to publish an official opinion encouraging healthcare providers to lead by example when it comes to vaccines (linked above), I don’t see that much of a difference, certainly not enough to claim “[chiropractors] are, as a group, pushing an antivaccine thing”. So I will say they aren’t until I hear otherwise from them rather than from a group with a vested interest in denigrating their practice.
Here are a few more not-so-controversial articles from the ACA’s website.
Pro vaccine article denies autism connection
https://www.acatoday.org/content_css.cfm?CID=5242
H1N1 article specifically cites CDC vaccine recommendation
http://www.acatoday.org/content_css.cfm?CID=3679
A long article on Ethics specifically questioning the ethics of “some chiropractors” advising against vaccination (about halfway down, under “Public Health”).
http://www.acatoday.org/content_css.cfm?CID=5238
So where is the preponderance of evidence supporting your claim that chiropractors as a group (not select individuals) are against vaccination?
Here’s how i see it. Vaccines are good, infectious diseases are bad.
Vaccines initially were great for the big kid diseases that were killers, and throw in a couple–diptheria, pertussis, tetanus.
My father’s sister died of tetanus as a child on the farm in Iowa.
Lots of dead kids in graves all over this coutnry from diptheria and whooping cough.
So then, in the 50s Salk got the polio vaccine and stopped the worst damn thing–i had classmates who had polio.
When my father was a physician he supervised for the county we lived in in Iowa the Sabine oral vaccine–thought to be better. Live vaccine, had some negative impacts since it was live.
The latest most important vaccine is Hemphilus B because it stopped meningitis in its tracks.
argue about hepatitis B but its a common world wide diseas that causes liver failure and cancer in its chronic forms.
as for vaccines for some other diseases like varicella (chicken pox) the diseas is trouble for adults but pretty benign in kids. herpes zoster and varicella pneumonia in adults are the problems, both a consideration.
influenza vaccine is a hit and miss and hotly debated thing–the swine influenza and a couple of strains were devestating in the past–much more virulent. I get vaccinated every year as a physician.
flu is a killer. you decide.
Now, GHO5ST lets have it out about Chiros–they are, as a group, pushing an antivaccine thing–don’t say they aren’t. Sure, some Chiros stay out of the fray, but if there is one group that really has been active in objecting to vaccines, it’s Chiropractors, who have no business talking about immunity or vaccine. They don’t study medicine, but they have all kinds of opinions about medical matters and they have a cultish contrarian position on allopathic medicine.
So don’t expect me to give them a pass.
They push magical food supplements, and they are antagonistic to medical therapy as a matter of principle.
They push healthy and natural and such very effectively, but a lot of the non manipulative work they do is not much more than a kind of cultish thing without a lot of proven benefits.
Here’s what chiropractors officially believe about vaccination.
http://www.acatoday.org/level2_css.cfm?ID=10&T2ID=117&T1ID=10&searchQuery=vaccine
http://www.chiropractic.org/?p=ica/policies#immunization
Seems more about personal freedom of choice than medical practice.
The AMA has no such clear-cut public policy. I couldn’t find anything on their site that claims they are for compulsory vaccination however I did find this opinion
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-ethics/code-medical-ethics/opinion9133.page
Which includes the phrase, “(a) Accept immunization absent a recognized medical, religious, or philosophic reason to not be immunized.” So it would seem that at least some in the AMA also support “each individual’s right to freedom of choice in his/her own health care based on an informed awareness of the benefits and possible adverse effects of vaccination.” The main difference being that the AMA verbiage seems to stipulate “recognized” whatever that means.
The AMA is much more clear about whom they think should pay if a vaccine manufacturer actually does mess up and hurt somebody.
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/legal-topics/litigation-center/case-summaries-topic/vaccine-act.page
For those who don’t know about the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986:
http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/index.html
So it would seem the official AMA position on vaccines is that everyone should get them as long as they don’t have a “recognized” medical, religious, or philosophical reason not too and if anything goes wrong the vaccine buying public should have to pay and the pharmaceutical company should be granted complete immunity. I found no word on who they think should have the authority to declare a religion or philosophy “recognized”.
There’s a big difference between a doctor and a politician with a medical degree. Sadly, a lot of people can’t tell the difference.
http://www.nbce.org/wp-content/uploads/analysis_chapter_08.pdf
The National Board of Chiropractic Examiners recommend chiropractic for diabetes, renal conditions, immune disorders, etc….why there is hardly anything that can’t be addressed by getting one’s back cracked.