Canadian Chiropractic Association's ship is without a captain

He holds out this statement about modern chiropractic, "No other health discipline in modern times has been as thoroughly investigated as chiropractic..."

Well so what!!

No other discipline has done so little for so many. It doesn't matter that 6 or 6,000 government bodies have investigated chiropractic. It is no different than saying that 6,000 astrologers studied the stars and the moon and came up with the conclusion that there is something out there in the heavens that we can't explain, but we'll do the best job possible to rob you blind. And better yet, the bloody government will help us do it.

Mr. Bryans forgets one thing, that thousands of chiropractors are being trained in North America in substandard schools, by substandard teachers, and have nothing between their brains other than how the hell they are going to pay their bills.

Chiropractic loan defaults in the U.S. are the largest of any health profession, because there are too many chiropractors who can't find jobs. Canadian chiropractic students that study in the U.S. are left with an unbelievable debt load, and when they come back to Canada, they say that there are far too many chiropractors where they hang up their shingle.

Dozens of chiropractic students are suing their own colleges for not teaching them correctly. Scientologists, and Moonies, and other cult members fill key positions in the North American chiropractic profession.

They train pediatric chiropractors in weekend seminars in hotels and give them fake certificates that say that they can treat infants and newborn babies for subluxations that don't exists. They form anti-vaccine propaganda groups, taking out large advertisements in weekly tabloids to tell their local populace that vaccines are evil and that the pharmaceutical industry is out to get their first born child and turn them into automatons for the 5th Reich.

The chiropractic profession is far from being the most scrutinized profession. Bryans represents a profession that thrives on controversy, that pokes fingers at medical doctors because they are out to destroy them, and yet he doesn't admit for one moment that there are hundreds of fringe chiropractors who turn the world of reality upside down, and the regulators don't care.

I run www.ChiroWatch.com, a Canadian based web site dedicated to those people who have been victimized by chiropractic procedures that are not only illogical, they are criminal. We cover quack chiropractors who prey on their patients with unproved testing procedures such as applied kinesiology, EAV, SEMG, thermography because their patients are basically told that they will help diagnose and cure their every ill.

Chiropractors invest their time and money to hire marketing gurus to tell them what to do, what colour to paint their office, and what music to have in the background, none of which contributes to science based chiropractic.

The bottom line is this he/she with the most bells and whistles gets to call the tune, and the direction that many chiropractors who graduate today are headed is onto the bloody cliffs, screaming loudly, above the roar of those in their profession who would like to guide the ship quietly into their birth, to sail another day.

The media portrays chiropractors as the victims of an allopathic witch-hunt. The Canadian Chiropractic Association recently teamed up with the Ontario Chiropractic Association in a multi-media extravanza partnered by of all things, Chatelaine Magazine. You can't find out any information on their own web sites about pediatric chiropractic because they have intentionally removed all mention of their involvement in pediatrics, and yet there are dozens of Canadian chiropractors that have taken the brochures and the web contents that had been running and placed them on their own sites. Here are just two of them:

The CCA and the OCA have been unable, or more likely, unwilling to ask those chiropractors to take their logos off their sites, and to cease and desist in retransmitting the information that they intentionally removed from their own sites.

So, I think it is G. Roland Bryans who should tell the Canadian public, what exactly the CCA is all about. Why has the CCA and other Provincial chiropractic associations failed to explain to the public that some chiropractors are quacks, that some intentionally lie to their patients about their diagnoses and their treatments? You would think that after 105 years of treating back pains, that someone in the CCA would have figured out that some chiropractors are just crooks.

If they can demonstrate a willingness to clean house, a failure of most of the regulated health professions, that would be a good thing. But, up until now they have failed to do that.

The answer is that they are afraid that it might destroy their credibility. Well lah-dee-dah. What has chiropractic done for us lately? Ads in the TV Guide, televised 30 second spots, and ads on the Chatelaine web site, that's a whole lot right there.

Can the chiropractic community stand by and blindly allow pediatric chiropractors to insult the intelligence of the Canadian taxpayer and the insurance industry for one more year? Can the health plans that pays for this in about half of the Provinces continue this charade?

I think that Bryans and his entourage of chiropractic association yahoos ought to spend a night on call at a major pediatric hospital, and tag along with the pediatric intensivist as he adjusts the respirator settings on a ventilator of a 5 year old child who is in a coma because his measles encephalitis has fried his brain stem, because someone who practices chiropractic at the corner of Yonge and St. Clair advised a parent to ignore the public health recommendations to have their child immunized.

When the CCA and the regulators clean house, and when the rats have left the ship, maybe then we could have another commission, or another study that will show that indeed chiropractic is headed on a straighter path to shore. Until then, chiropractic is without a captain, it without a helmsman, but it has plenty of ballast it has failed to off-load.

Terry Polevoy, M.D., FRCP(C)

Chirowatch.com

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