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).

Saturday, January 22, 2005

FSU Chiropractic School is Unneeded

Greg Smith, MD wrote:

> Now, I would dearly love to believe that FSU
> is going to produce a new breed of chiropractor
> that will slowly but surely push out the wackiness.


Okay, let's assume that happened. What would be left?

You'd have *someone* claiming to be an FSU "new breed" chiropractor, who wouldn't be a real chiropractor, and who wouldn't be in sync with the profession. That *person* is not the profession, and a favorable evaluation of that *person* wouldn't apply in any way at all to the *profession* and all the other chiros and schools. None of those chiros, schools, and organizations will reform.

For a profession to have legitimacy, it must have something that is both *needed* and *unique*. A whole profession based on one technique that is not unique, and that has limited usefulness, is wasteful foolishness. Whatever that it uses that is legitimate is shared far too much with Physical Therapy. There is too much overlap to make a whole education - as well as a doctoral program, an FSU school, and a whole profession - have any justification for existence.

The profession must also be reformable, without it's foundation being destroyed, and nothing of worth being left. That is not the case with chiropractic. Nothing uniquely chiropractic has legitimacy.

Legitimacy, uniqueness, and need should be established *before* any more schools get started. If not, the *profession* will only use a *reform* school to lend it an undeserved appearance of legitimacy. Until the profession as a whole, and most chiropractors in practice, become legitimate, it is foolish to do anything that can lend them any appearance of legitimacy.

Why repeat the homeopathic legal mess? Why legitimize nonsense by making it part of the legitimate university system?

If you don't know where you are, or which way is home, running faster and building bigger won't get you home quicker. It will only create the impression that it doesn't matter where you come from or where you're going, because a new reality is being created, which would be a legalized fiction.

Chiropractic needs to figure out where they are, then admit that they are on the wrong planet, then self destruct and delicense themselves, and move into legitimate fields of labor.

It won't happen.