Confessions of a Quackbuster

This blog deals with healthcare consumer protection, and is therefore about quackery, healthfraud, chiropractic, and other forms of so-Called "Alternative" Medicine (sCAM).

Sunday, July 18, 2004

Chiropractic Position Statement & Disclaimer

Chiropractic is the most divided profession of any kind that I know of. This division is just one of the myriad ways it resembles religions and cults. What can one expect when the founder himself, D.D. Palmer, considered his creation a religion? It has been described as a biotheological cult, and I can't think of a better description. "The Big Idea" is where it's at. If you don't understand IT, you can't understand chiropracTIC.

Chiropractic is to science, what Scientology is to religion. It is just as much a pseudoscience, as Scientology is a pseudoreligion.

Since D.D. Palmer considered chiropractic to be a religion on a par with Christian Science (but it has usually pretended and aspired to be scientific), we must conclude that it is something like a religion, but it's masquerading as a science.

Since it has brainwashed its own practitioners and its disciples into believing it is a science, and most practitioners focus on it as a business, while still others are attempting to make it scientific, the result is that it has become a pseudoscientific business.

The unhealthy combination of false metaphysical philosophies, unscientific practices & beliefs, mass marketing, brainwashing, cultish behavior, greed, and little self-regulation causes it to be an illegitimate profession.

It must be constantly monitored and regulated from the outside. It cannot be trusted to do the job itself. If it (legislatively speaking) is given an inch, it will take a mile. No other healthcare profession even comes close to it in negative aspects. It is in a class for itself, and, fortunately, that's where it wants to be. It just needs to be kept there, because its ambitions are expansionistic and unhealthy.


DISCLAIMER:

My criticism is not directed at ethical, science-based chiropractors. It is primarily directed at the profession itself, that keeps producing and protecting the "real" chiropractors who are traditional, "straight" and "subluxation-based". They are like dinosaurs, who should have been extinct a long time ago, but are still being educated in even the largest chiropractic schools. Many of the newer and younger chiropractors are even worse than their forefathers.

I do not hold the extreme views of certain chiro skeptics, who seem to consider all DCs as crooks, and manipulation as having no value at all, etc. While their criticism is often correct, I believe that they go too far and thus impede the efforts of reformers. It's not that black and white an issue, and is often based on a lack of understanding of physical medicine.

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Chiropractic Position Statement & Disclaimer