The Shaw Conference Centre in Edmonton, Alberta, recently played host to the first North American Research Conference on Complementary & Integrative Medicine. The chiropractic profession was well-represented at the meeting, with 11 workshops and poster presentations examining the use of chiropractic for particular conditions and the role of chiropractors in various health settings.
Sponsored by the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine, the conference was designed to promote educational collaboration across the spectrum of health disciplines, and featured presentations from some of the world's leading researchers and health care providers on a variety of complementary and integrative approaches to care.
The first presentation related directly to chiropractic occurred at the beginning of the conference when William Meeker, DC, MPH, vice president of research at the Palmer Center for Chiropractic Research, co-moderated an abstract session titled "Integrative Strategies for Low Back Pain and Cardiac Disease." The following day, Craig Nelson, MS, DC, a director of health sciences research with American Specialty Health, served as a co-moderator during an abstract session titled "Clinical Trials for Musculoskeletal Conditions."
On that same day, chiropractic and medical researchers presented a three-hour discussion, "Risks and Benefits of Spinal Manipulation: Mutually Beneficial or Mutually Exclusive?" Dr. Nelson was joined in the discussion by four other doctors of chiropractic (Gert Bronfort, DC, PhD; Mitchell Haas, DC, MA; Eric Hurwitz, DC, PhD; Greg Kawchuk, DC, PhD), along with a medical doctor, Michael Hill, MD, from the University of Calgary.
In addition to the workshops and abstract sessions, chiropractic was featured in eight poster presentations, including:
The Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine (www.imconsortium.org) was established in 2002, and consists of 32 schools of medicine in the United States and Canada. Its mission, according to a statement on the consortium's Web site, is "to help transform medicine and health care through rigorous scientific studies, new models of clinical care, and innovative educational programs that integrate biomedicine, the complexity of human beings, the intrinsic nature of healing and the rich diversity of therapeutic systems." The North American Research Conference on Complementary & Integrative Medicine marked the first time that all consortium centers and other leading national and international CAM networks and organizations had been invited to come together to meet and share their research findings in a single location.
Many relevant diagnostic signs are not performed deliberately by the examiner or by the patient at the examiner’s direction. They are observed as the patient reacts to their condition. Fortin’s finger sign, Minor’s sign, and Vanzetti’s sign are three examples of this principle.
On Feb. 1, 2024, two more legislators – John R. Carter (R-Texas) and Robert “Bob” Good (R-Va.) – co-sponsored the Chiropractic Medicare Coverage Modernization Act of 2023, bringing the co-sponsor total to 155, two more than the total achieved over the entire two-year congressional cycle in which identical legislation last appeared (2021-22).
While working at the Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque, N.M., one of the primary care physicians stated that imaging every patient prior to receiving chiropractic was not medically necessary. It was at that point I reconsidered the need for the imaging of every patient to avoid malpractice.
