Turn on your TV and the chances are that sometime during the day you'll see not one but several items concerning the medical profession. There'll be some story on the early news about a miraculous heart transplant or miracle drug. Then some talk show will have an MD as a guest or you'll be treated to a rerun of some medical drama or watch the General Hospital soap. In the evening the news is peppered with more medical propaganda and first run medical TV shows. Several times a year MDs are represented in films while newspaper stories are books glorifying medicine are always being published.
Medicine is ubiquitous and enters into every aspect of our lives. It does so through ads for drugs and by having the pharmaceutical companies employ so many people. Think about it for a moment. Think about all the people who make the bottles for the drugs and the companies that make the caps for those bottles, not to mention all those employed making labels and then the cotton that's stuffed inside. In reality, medicine is more than just the MD -- it's really an army of special interests and incredible amounts of money that keeps the medical juggernaut rolling over everything in its way.
When you think of it that way it's quite amazing that chiropractic has not only survived but thrived and continues to grow faster than all the other healing arts. Even so, we bicker over a lousy 5 or 10 percent of the population instead of spending our energy trying to reach the other 95 percent.
What's also interesting is the incredible brainwashing that has taken place. The public, individually and as a whole, hates to admit when they are wrong and at the same time they love to have something to worship. To most, the MD is a "god on earth". He is the father or mother figure to whom someone may take all their problems. The MD knows everything from the weather to the latest on the stock market. He/she speaks with almost pontifical grace and wisdom.
For awhile I practiced in a community that catered to an older group of people. They were walking pharmacies and you could see their pockets bulging with medication and hear the rattling of the pills with every step they took.
In spite of it all, some would come in and "allow" me to minister to what was left after the medical assaults. They would let me adjust them with the unspoken proviso that I shouldn't cast aspersions upon the good intentions of medicine.
One patient had a prostatectomy with complications that narrowed the urethra. He went back to the hospital to have a tube inserted. The tube broke off and remained in the urethra. This then, naturally, required more surgery to remove the tube. During the surgery, improperly used medication caused a vascular collapse that put him in intensive care. After recovery he went back for surgery to once again attempt to remove the tube. That part was successful but during the procedure they apparently caused a tear in the bladder wall which was later found to be causing a dangerous buildup of toxins in the peritoneum. He had to once again have surgery to repair the bladder and the last I heard he had survived. But to this day the MDs are still his gods.
Keep remembering that chiropractic was and is built upon medical failure. The failed medical patient will only come to you after all the miracles of medicine have been tried. You are the last resort from a profession whom statistics show contribute to the deaths of approximately 3,000 people every week. A profession which gives only 60 hours of pharmacology to its students and then allows these same people the right to spend the rest of their professional lives prescribing strange chemicals they know little or nothing about to their helpless patients. A profession which the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment cannot prove the value of the vast majority.
This is the same profession which organized a quackery committee to destroy one of the safest and most effective forms of health care know to man and which they had to admit in open court they knew virtually nothing about. The same profession which is allowed by law to use physical therapy modalities with almost no training in this discipline, advise on nutrition without having studied the subject for a single hour, use acupuncture and adjust the bones of the body without having even glanced at a text on those subjects.
Organized medicine and the pharmaceutical companies constantly denegrate all forms of competition. Homeopathy is called quackery -- even though it's safe and effective -- because they don't understand it. Yet they will produce and prescribe drugs they know nothing about with a casual disregard for patient safety.
No, no. Medicine isn't all bad. They have their fancy machines and their heroic surgical procedures and their spectacular "breakthroughs." But the public is constantly informed about their successes. What about the human medical carnage that transpires every day? What about the successes of chiropractic -- a profession that has been built upon correcting medical mistakes? Why doesn't the public hear about chiropractic for a change?
Yes -- over the years I've said the preceding may times in various ways. It's just that every once in a while it has to come out. In the immortal words of Peter Finch as he admonished in the motion picture, "Network" -- So let's everyone stand. That's right -- stand up as you read this. Now go to a window -- stick your head out and yell at the top of your voice -- "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" There -- now does that feel better? Of course it does.
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.
Spearheaded by burgeoning scientific and clinical research literature, psychedelics have reached a level of media coverage and popular interest that has not been seen for over half a century. By “psychedelics,” we are referring to the unique class of substances that includes psilocybin (the active compound found in so-called “magic mushrooms”), LSD, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, and mescaline – each of which occurs in the natural world (except for LSD, which is a semi-synthetic compound).
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.
