Medical Scrutiny and Justification

I just spent an hour of my time reading a blog called Science-Based Medicine.  It was an interesting read, particularly the negative scrutiny of chiropractic.  There are various contributors to this blog who all reside as medical doctors.  The pessimistic nature of the blog made me realize how incredibly happy I am to have stayed in the chiropractic profession.

There are many MD's who support chiropractic and refer patients to them for services and there are others who hate DC's and do their best to defame the profession.  My impression of those who write such negative crap is they have nothing better to do besides sit around thinking negative thoughts.  The interesting thing is that most of the bad that I read was all about the vertebral subluxation theory.  By now, we all know that this theory has not been proven and with our education at University of Western States, we also know that health is a complicated biopsychosocial phenomenon.  The allopathic way is designed based on the western diet and the western culture of overindulgence and sedentary ways.  Drugs designed to ramp up some system or hault another are thrown at lazy, overindulgent people with the expectation they will magically become healthy.

Look at the epidemic of obesity.  It continues to climb regardless of the effort the AMA has made to slow it's progression.  When I read the negative propaganda about chiropractic, it gives me more motivation to continue forward.  It is really easy to judge something from the outside.  My suggestion is for the critics to spend some time at our school in the classroom and clinic systems.  Document our outcome measures and subjective markers.  Patients do get better with manual medicine and nutritional therapeutics and the results are longer lasting than drug regimens alone.

My hope is while in practice we students branch out of our chiropractic worlds and educate these naysaying ignorant fools.  It is annoying to read the garbage, particularly when the patients I am now treating are thriving under my care.  My colleagues at school have similar stories and I witness their success every time I am in the clinic with them as a secondary intern.  We fix the underlying problems, reduce pain and restore function without drugs or surgery.  I'd be jealous too if my toolbox masked results.

When you look at our curriculum at UWS, there are protocols in place that we use with patient care that are peer-reviewed by clinicians and professors on campus.  A consensus is derived and we students implement it with patient care.  We have a protocol for dyslipidemia, obesity, dermatitis, hypertension, osteoporosis and many others.  The emphasis isn't on which drug to implement in patients suffering from dyslipidemia but how to categorize the patient into a level of risk and severity for management.  Is pharmaceutical intervention a possibility for some individuals, definitely.  Do we automatically refer out for such therapy, not usually.  We advise natural methods of treatment that have been shown to work in research and practice.  How is this quackery?

We use the same orthopedic, neurologic and primary care physical exams as any MD or DO.  Our exams are actually much more holistic than most.  We are trained to rule out red flag diseases which may mask a mechanically oriented problem.  We refer severe conditions out just like primary care MD's and DO's do.  Many times we refer to specialists versus general practitioners.  We are trained to draw blood, send for lab analyses and interpret the results upon their return.  We can take our own X-rays (unlike MD's and DO's) and we are trained extensively in bone pathology (anomalies, fractures, metabolic disease & cancer etc.) and clinical pathology.

The last thing I will share is about my continued interactions with simulated patients.  We use simulators that work at Oregon Health and Science University, the medical school in Portland Oregon and each week we get a new simulator to take a history and do a physical exam on.  In 3 of my interactions with these simulators, I have been told that we student chiropractors are consistently much further along in our diagnostic abilities and patient communication skills than the students at OHSU who are at our equivalent level of education.  This to me is such a compliment not only personally but professionally.  It makes me proud to know the exhaustive work at school and in the clinic is paying off.

Despite what the critics say, we are competent practitioners and our approach to healthcare is better than theirs.

All for now