A Series of Tubes

So recently I have been using a computer that does not have firefox installed and instead only has internet explorer 6 installed. This is basically puts me in a computer user vortex of evil torment. I noticed that my blog does not display properly under IE 6. As a matter of fact IE 6 crashed completely about half way through writing this post. I might have to change my theme in order to correct the rendering errors. In the mean time I’m going to complete my post in the computer lab. What I really want to tell you about is not my  computer and browser difficulties but rather something that happened during lunch.

The area in front of the bookstore is the place where you get accosted to sign petitions, are given various fliers, and whatnot. Recently all the frats and sororities have their tables set up which is probably a topic for yet another post. Next to the fratties there is a guy with a demo for action chiropractic center. I always wondered if chiropractors were legitimate or snake oil vendors.

So I went to go talk to the person in front of the action chiropractic center demo, Dr. Ron Schmidt. According to his bio on his website, he graduated from Palmer west. This institution gets it’s name from Daniel David Palmer, the founder of modern chiropractic therapy. Palmer had previous experience as a spiritual and magnetic healer. From the wikipedia entry on the guy:

While working as a magnetic healer in Davenport, IA, he encountered a deaf janitor who he discovered had a palpable lump in his back. He theorized that the lump and his deafness were related. After a reported successful restoration of the man’s hearing^[2], it led to the beginning of Chiropractic history. His theories revolved around the concept that altered nerve flow was the cause of all disease, and that misaligned spinal vertebrae had an effect on the nerve flow. He postulated that restoring these vertebra to their proper alignment would restore health.

Also from wikipedia is the following juicy quote from DD Palmer:

“A subluxated verteba… is the cause of 95 percent of all diseases… The other five percent is caused by displaced joints other than those of the vertebral column.”

I don’t think that modern chiropractors are so bold as to make dumb statements like that. D.D. Palmer was living at a time when the evidence for the germ theory of disease was just starting to trickle in. Today there are mountains of evidence supporting the germ theory of disease and no evidence supporting the subluxated verteba theory of disease. Despite this Dr. Ron D. Schmidt used the term subluxated vertebra.

So how is it that in the year 2008 a completely disproven theory of disease is still bouncing around? Well the first thing that chiropractors learned is when to back off on the crazy talk. My questions to Ron were “what does it take to become certified? Who certifies you? Are there journals and research that support your claim that Chiropractic therapy does anything more than a placebo? Why shouldn’t I just get a massage and skip all the claims that I’m getting a medical treatment? (well I didn’t ask the last question but that was pretty much running through my head the whole time)

The response to these questions was that it is very tough to become certified and that there are in fact Journals where proof that chiropractic treatment works statistically better than a placebo. Ron had some trouble remembering the exact name of the journal (JUSR or JCRF…) so he told me to go to the ACA website (the fourth google hit) and find my journal articles there, the results of which are in the paragraph below. Of course there was no mention that the founder of chiropractic therapy happened to believe in other quack medical theories.

A big Journal for chiropractors is the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics - I looked at this one and was sorely disappointed at the attempt at science. The first article I read was “Comparison of 3 Physical Therapy Modalities For Acute Pain in Lumbar Disc Herniation Measured by Clinical Evaluation and Magnetic Resonance Imaging”. This “study” had 3 groups, each group received either Traction, laser, and ultrasound therapies. The result - each one showed improvement. The problem is that if a scientific study was performed, there needed to be a baseline. At a minimum there should have been a group that did not receive treatment and another group that received a placebo treatment. Obviously this journal has very reduced standards to get information published. I skimmed through a couple more of the published articles from them and wasnot surprised to find that they also lacked the scientific standards of real journals.

The thing is I was looking for proof of this subluxated vertebra thing. I think a massage probably does help your back pain, but what about this scientific sounding term. Is it legitimate? Part of the problem in searching for such a term is that real doctors use the term when describing when your spine is so bad that is requires surgery while chiropractors use the term to describe people that need chiropractic therapy, which if you ask a chiropractor is everyone. I found out after reading paper such as this one that subluxation has come to mean a general back pain. Chiropractors have used and continue to use various methods to try to detect subluxation. The thing is that according to this paper “Sixteen methods notionally used to detect spinal sublaxation by chiropractors were isolated form the literature. There has been some research into the reliability of some of these methods used by chiropractors, however, the results are variable and inconclusive.” I prefer the absurd statement made to promote a subluxation detector in 1924 (shown at left): “THE MOST VALUABLE INVENTION OF THE AGE BECAUSE IT PICKS, PROVES AND LOCATES THE CAUSE OF ALL DISEASES OF THE HUMAN RACE.”

The thing is that non specific muscle or back pain is tough to treat. Having a chiropractor tell you that Vertebral Subluxation and spine alignment is the cause of your pain when such a statement has never been proven is a bald faced lie. The moral of the story is that a masseuse than a chiropractor probably offer the same amount of therapy while the chiropractor will X-ray your spine and tell you medical mumbo jumbo for a slightly increased fee.

The thing is that since Chiropractors know that massage works, they come up with all sorts of ways of attempting to detect and treat something they don’t understand. Ron, the “Doctor” in front of the bookstore, was using a Spinal Analysis Machine. This is a machine that has two scales where you place one foot on each scale and rubber tubing that you adjust on a metal frame. I should have just looked up that machine to begin with. It is unable to diagnose anything meaningful other than your personal gullibility. You can see a picture of it below:

Of course these machines, which look like a machine a quack would use, cost thousands of dollars. I really need to start making these things and selling them to Chiropractors. Since the market on machines with household scales in them is already taken I could make some other device for chiropractors that makes some electrical reading from various parts of the body that will make chiropractors look more professional. Hell I should probably just sell them all Geiger counters so that they can take readings after the X-ray telling their patients that the device is measuring the increased neural activity after the treatment, and not the increased radiation from that X-ray machine. Be ready to get your pirate neural excitation flow meter at your local certified (yes my machine will require certification for proper use) chiropractor.