I’ve been treating patients for over 48 years now. I’ve never had a patient have a stroke. All my friends are chiropractors. They haven’t seen one yet either. However, a study from the American Heart Association found that there is an association between Cervical Manipulative Therapy and Cervical Arterial dissections. What on earth could that possibly mean, an association?
What is the difference between an association and a causation? Forget that these people might have been having neck pain because their arteries were already dissecting, and that is why they sought treatment. The Heart Association didn’t consider that or maybe they did, but the public certainly doesn’t seem to consider that. The study was never conclusive whether the practitioner caused the stroke or not. But the media that gets most of their revenue from drug companies made sure that the public was scared to death to go to a chiropractor.
There is a published study that demonstrates a connection to eating ice cream with drowning. It is not about eating ice cream before swimming and getting a cramp, then drowning. The study reveals that the nationwide consumption of ice cream goes up each year and so does the incidence of drowning deaths. This study found an association, but not causation between the two. What was more likely the cause of the result in this study was that when the temperature increases, more people like to swim off the heat. But they also like to eat ice cream in the summertime. I don’t think many people would be fooled by this study into thinking that the ice cream was causing more drownings. Unless you ate some of that really cheap ice cream and decided life wasn’t worth living anymore, but that is another story for another day.
In the case of having a dissecting vertebral artery incident, there are so many confounding factors that cannot be accounted for, such as the patient already had the event. There was a case in Ontario Canada where not very intelligent people in charge decided to outlaw chiropractic because a woman had a stroke 30 days after leaving the chiropractor’s office.
She was obese, diabetic, on birth control pills, and a heavy smoker of cigarettes. Nicotine damages arteries. So do all those other factors. Each factor increases the odds of having a stroke, but the big one in this case is people don’t usually die 30 days later after a vertebral artery dissection. Most don’t last a few hours; they go in a few minutes. It happens much more at hair salons than anywhere else. I’m not blaming clean hair on that statistic. Maybe I’ve never been sued because the patient never walked out of my office and into a lawyer’s office because more likely than not, they are not going to be walking out. These things do happen, but considering the number of people getting adjusted all over the world with no adverse reactions, you might have a higher chance of getting blown up by a terrorist in an airplane, fall out of the sky on the wing, and on the way down, the terrorist also falls on the same wing you are sitting on and he tries to blow you up again.
Lastly, the Playboy Model that they claim died from a chiropractor was big news for a long time. They didn’t report that she had fallen down a flight of stairs on her neck and damaged her Vertebral Artery a month before going to the chiropractor. If the emergency room had done a Doppler scan of her arteries, they would have seen the damage. Sadly, it was discovered after going to the chiropractor. Again, the odds of this happening in the chiropractor’s office are almost the same as winning the lottery. If it does happen, there is no proof as of right now that it happened because of the chiropractic adjustment. These things just happen and when they do it is one out of a few hundred billion. You’ll probably die from intestinal poisoning at the fast-food stand in the alley way before this ever happens to you.
