Discover Magazine: Check Your Sources
Editor's Note: Our print issue erroneously attributed this article to Prevention magazine (which actually has been a friend to chiropractic lately, as you'll see in our April 1 issue). Our apologies for this oversight and any confusion it may cause print readers. It has been corrected in all instances below.
You'd think by now the media would have ample resources at its disposal to write about the back / back pain without disparaging chiropractic. Apparently not Discover magazine, whose March 2016 issue features an article titled, "20 Things You Didn't Know About Your Back." The article covers diverse back factoids ranging from anatomical particulars to the first recorded accounts of back tattoos, but then includes the following as points #16-18:
"Don't try this at home, kids: 16 The modern practice of chiropractic began when Daniel David Palmer, a self-styled 'magnetic healer,' claimed to have restored the hearing of a deaf man by popping one of his vertebra back into place in 1895. 17 Palmer believed that a back out of whack – 'subluxation,' or vertebral misalignment – causes 95 percent of diseases. 18 A 2012 white paper by the Institute for Science in Medicine, however, declared, "There is no scientific evidence that chiropractic subluxations exist or that their purported 'detection' or 'correction' confers any health benefit." Ouch.
Of note (but not mentioned in the Discover article, as might be expected), the Institute for Science in Medicine lists Drs. Stephen Barrett and Edzard Ernst as founding fellows – neither of whom has ever been anything but negative when it comes to the chiropractic profession.
Expect one or more of our national chiropractic organizations to respond to the Discover article soon. More to come.
Taking Action Against Opioids
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a guideline that addresses the opioid overuse epidemic, particularly when it comes to treating chronic pain. The proposed guideline, finalized now that the comment window has closed, includes a recommendation to use conservative forms of pain management as an initial treatment option. To review the 2016 Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, click here.
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.
