Posted on 01/01/2005 7:13:21 AM PST by aculeus
Some threaten to resign over the proposed school.
A growing number of professors in the Florida State University College of Medicine are saying they will resign if FSU administrators continue to pursue a proposed chiropractic school.
"I would no longer wish to volunteer my teaching energies to FSU medical school, should it encompass a school of chiropractic," wrote Dr. Ian Rogers, an assistant professor at FSU's Pensacola campus, in a Dec. 15 e-mail. "This is plainly ludicrous!!!!"
The threatened resignations - at least seven to date, all from assistant professors who work part time - reflect a belief among many in the medical establishment that chiropractic is a "pseudo-science" that leads to unnecessary and sometimes harmful treatments. Professors are even circulating a parody map of campus that places a fictional Bigfoot Institute, School of Astrology and Crop Circle Simulation Laboratory near a future chiropractic school.
But the professors' stance has a political aim, too.
Opposition is clearly mounting as the chiropractic school heads for crucial votes in January before the FSU board of trustees and the state Board of Governors.
In fact, the school is now seen as a test case for the fledgling Board of Governors, which critics have accused of kowtowing to Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature on the higher education issues it is supposed to oversee.
FSU was closed for the holidays Tuesday. FSU president T.K. Wetherell, provost Larry Abele and John Thrasher, chairman of the FSU board of trustees, could not be reached for comment.
But Sen. Dennis Jones, the Treasure Island Republican who spearheaded legislative support for the school in the spring, said the professors were "overreacting."
He accused anti-chiropractic groups from outside the state of stirring faculty opposition at FSU.
"If they resign, so be it," said Jones, a chiropractor himself. The instructors don't deserve to teach at FSU, he said, "if they're putting their credentials with people known for promoting professional bigotry."
The Legislature appropriated $9-million annually for the chiropractic school, which was pushed by Jones and then-Senate President Jim King, R-Jacksonville, an FSU graduate. It would be the only school of its kind in the country.
As supporters envision it, more than 100 new faculty members would train legions of chiropractors, with a special emphasis on Hispanic and African-American students. The school would also draw lucrative federal grants in alternative medicine.
Planning began years ago, but criticism didn't ramp up until after the legislative session.
Some opponents see the school as an end run around the Board of Governors, which oversees the state's 11 universities but has yet to consider the chiropractic school. Last week, a group headed by former university system chancellor E.T. York filed a lawsuit against the board, accusing it of failing to flex its constitutionally granted muscle and pointing to the chiropractic school as a prime example.
But some FSU faculty members are upset, too, fearing the school will shatter FSU's academic reputation. The list of critics include FSU's two Nobel laureates - Robert Schreiffer, a physicist, and Harold Walter Kroto, a chemist - and Robert Holton, the chemistry professor who developed the cancer-fighting drug Taxol, which has brought FSU tens of millions of dollars in royalties.
In recent weeks, more than 500 faculty members have signed petitions against the chiropractic school, including about 70 in the medical college, said Dr. Raymond Bellamy, an assistant professor who is leading the charge against the proposal. The medical college has more than 100 faculty members.
Some of them say they're willing to do more than sign a petition.
"I teach wonderful medical students from Florida State University here in Orlando," Dr. James W. Louttit wrote in an e-mail to Bellamy, who shared it with the St. Petersburg Times. "If they decide to start a chiropractic school I would no longer be able to support this program."
"It should come as no surprise that no major medical institution in this country, public or private, has embraced chiropractic medicine," wrote Dr. Henry Ho, a Winter Park physician and FSU assistant professor, in another e-mail. "If Florida State University were to do so, its fledgling attempt for credibility as a medical institution of stature would be severely jeopardized."
The situation at FSU isn't the first time chiropractors have sought to tie themselves to an established university.
In the late 1990s, faculty at York University in Toronto - one of Canada's largest schools - considered plans to affiliate with Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College. The plan would have brought York millions of dollars in new facilities and donations and given the chiropractic school academic credibility.
After a bitter, years-long fight, York faculty narrowly vetoed the plan in 2001.
At FSU, faculty have not officially voiced their concerns about the chiropractic school. Bellamy said they fear retaliation from lawmakers if they do.
"Everybody wants somebody else to kill it," he said.
Ron Matus can be reached at 727 893-8873 or
matus@sptimes.com
© Copyright 2003 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved
??
And you got this source from where?
(let me guess, was it your chiropractor?)
I'm not claiming surgery will help with pain reduction in all cases. But if what you said were half true, then the >2% of folks I've worked with post surgery, who are near or virtually painfree are full of bovine poop.
http://www.chirobase.org/12Hx/mencken.html
Chiropractic (1924)
H.L. Mencken
This preposterous quackery flourishes lushIy in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the old-time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned, there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even chiropractic "hospitals." The Mormons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these "hospitals" copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord -- in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.
Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an old quack named Andrew T. Still, the father of osteopathy. For years the osteopaths merchanted them, and made money at the trade. But as they grew opulent they grew ambitious, i.e., they began to study anatomy and physiology. The result was a gradual abandonment of Papa Still's ideas. The high-toned osteopath of today is a sort of eclectic. He tries anything that promises to work, from tonsillectomy to the x-rays. With four years' training behind him, he probably knows more anatomy than the average graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, or at all events, more osteology. Thus enlightened, he seldom has much to say about pinched nerves in the back. But as he abandoned the Still revelation it was seized by the chiropractors, led by another quack, one Palmer. This Palmer grabbed the pinched nerve nonsense and began teaching it to ambitious farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist preachers in a few easy lessons. Today the backwoods swarm with chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough pressure on the rural politicians to get themselves licensed. [It is not altogether a matter of pressure. Large numbers of rustic legislators are themselves believers in chiropractic. So are many members of Congress.] Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits -- retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school -- say homeopathy -- plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.
Such quackeries suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal. When these botched fall into the hands of competent medical men they are very likely to be patched up and turned loose upon the world, to beget their kind. But massaged along the backbone to cure their lues [syphylis], they quickly pass into the last stages, and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them. What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers. That the labors of quacks tend to propagate epidemics and so menace the lives of all of us, as is alleged by their medical opponents -- this I doubt. The fact is that most infectious diseases of any seriousness throw out such alarming symptoms and so quickly that no sane chiropractor is likely to monkey with them. Seeing his patient breaking out in pustules, or choking, or falling into a stupor, he takes to the woods at once, and leaves the business to the nearest medical man. His trade is mainly with ambulant patients; they must come to his studio for treatment. Most of them have lingering diseases; they tour all the neighborhood doctors before they reach him. His treatment, being nonsensical, is in accord with the divine plan. It is seldom, perhaps, that he actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps any a worthy soul from getting well.
The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competition serious and unpleasant. As I have said, it was their Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who invented all of the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that the lowly chiropractors now employ with such vast effect, and for years the osteopaths had a monopoly of them. But when they began to grow scientific and ambitious their course of training was lengthened until it took in all sorts of tricks and dodges borrowed from the regular doctors, or resurrection men, including the plucking of tonsils, adenoids and appendices, the use of the stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of psychiatry. They now harry their students furiously, and turn them out ready for anything from growing hair on a bald head to frying a patient with the x-rays. All this new striving, of course, quickly brought its inevitable penalties. The osteopathic graduate, having sweated so long, was no longer willing to take a case of delirium tremens for $2, and in consequence he lost patients. Worse, very few aspirants could make the long grade. The essence of osteopathy itself could be grasped by any lively farmhand or night watchman in a few weeks, but the borrowed magic baffled him. Confronted by the phenomenon of gastrulation, or by the curious behavior of heart muscle, or by any of the current theories of immunity, he commonly took refuge, like his brother of the orthodox faculty, in a gulp of laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises altogether. Thus he was lost to osteopathic science, and the chiropractors took him in; nay, they welcomed him. He was their meat. Borrowing that primitive part of osteopathy which was comprehensible to the meanest understanding, they threw the rest overboard, at the same time denouncing it as a sorcery invented by the Medical Trust. Thus they gathered in the garage mechanics, ash-men and decayed welterweights, and the land began to fill with their graduates. Now there is a chiropractor at every crossroads.
I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make imbeciles immortal. If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney's spot and playing on his vertebra as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven. And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later on. In such matters, I am convinced, the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of medical busybodies. If the latter gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of hangmen, policemen and other such legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether, and the present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear. I can't convince myself that would work any good to the world. On the contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer oil goes through the mails Homo americanus is improved to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved.
But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect. It has superb potentialities, but only too often they are not converted into concrete cadavers. The hygienists rescue many of its foreordained customers, and, turning them over to agents of the Medical Trust, maintained at the public expense, get them cured. Moreover, chiropractic itself is not certainly fatal: even an Iowan with diabetes may survive its embraces. Yet worse, I have a suspicion that it sometimes actually cures. For all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems to know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of vagrant vertebra upon the spinal nerves. And it may be true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be able to relieve that pressure. What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity. Let a thousand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine their backbones and determine what is the matter with them, and then let these diagnoses be checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine. Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose maladies have been determined. My guess is that the chiropractors' errors in diagnosis will run to at least 95% and that their failures in treatment will push 99%. But I am willing to be convinced.
Where is there is such a committee to be found? I undertake to nominate it at ten minutes' notice. The land swarms with men competent in anatomy and pathology, and yet not engaged as doctors. There are thousands of hospitals, with endless clinical material. I offer to supply the committee with cigars and music during the test. I offer, further, to supply both the committee and the chiropractors with sound wet goods. I offer, finally, to give a bawdy banquet to the whole Medical Trust at the conclusion of the proceedings.
_______________________
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was a controversial American journalist, essayist and literary critic. During the 1920s, he became famous for his vitriolic attacks on what he considered to be the hypocrisy, stupidity, and bigotry of much of American life. For obvious reasons, his critics considered him highly skilled at satire but intolerant and often crude. This essay was published in the Baltimore Evening Sun in December 1924. Although the medical knowledge of his day was still quite primitive, Mencken knew enough to realize that chiropractic theory was preposterous.
I've had the pleasure of working with some fantastic DO's.
Good luck in your studies!
Obviously, he didn't. He's an old, dead fool.
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-09-12—1956-01-29), the “Sage of Baltimore”, American author, critic, newspaper man and iconoclast.
“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.” —“Epitaph”, Smart Set, 1921-12-03, p. 33
My friend's little brother in California was working as a bartender (while taking some pre-req courses at a J.C.) before he was admitted to Chiropractic school.
Sorry not to reply sooner. Please note, I said "vertebral
artery". It is a thingee also in the neck but a little further back.
Sounds as if you're making an apples-to-oranges comparison of the "variables" contributing to your "customer satisfaction".
However, there is a growing group of chiropractic practioners who limit their practice to treating back and neck problems through manipulation often combined with massage and physio-therapy. These practioners will not hesitate to refer patients to regular doctors for problems beyond their scope of practice.
I recently had my first visit to a chiropractor. I woke up with severe pain and stiffness in my lower back and decided to schedule an appointment with a friend who is a chiropractor. After two sessions of deep massage and manipulations, I am pain free and have been put on an excercise program that hopefully will keep me from having further problems. While I wouldn't consult my chiropractor for my hypertension, allegies or other medical problems, but I wouldn't hesitate to seek chiropractic help for similar back or neck problems.
Half the proponents of chiropractic say this. The other half are busy citing examples of chipropractic-alleopathic cooperation. Read this threat and you will find both.
Personally, I think that the allopathic profession, at its best, stands for evidence based empirical medicine, in the same way that the US in 1800 stood for liberty. Empiricism, like liberty, is an ideal to be striven for even though we will always debate what it teaches us and we might be far from reaching it. Allopaths who believe in what their profession stands for are constantly changing what they do as new and better evidence comes in, even if it goes 100% against prevailing wisdom. A few studies can thus wipe out an entire subspecialty, as happenned to surgical TB treatment in 1950. By contrast, chiropractors who believe in what their profession stands for believe that the cause of all disease -- misalignment of the spine -- was discovered once and for all times by Dr. Daniel David Palmer of Davenport Iowa in 1895. What they chiropractors do can, maybe, be changed a bit at the edges by research, but if a chiropractor is really open-minded about giving his patients the best possible care, he is quite simply a traitor to everything he was taught of his profession.
Do the alleopaths always live up to what their profession stands for? NO! And that is precisely why I have a lot of respect for the small minority of FSU alleopaths willing to give up some of their income for their principles.
I think their big problem is that the foundation of their discipline is mysticism, not science. They think that subtle energy or life force, similar to "chi" in acupuncture or "prana" in ayurveda, flows through the body along the nerves, and that misaligned vertebrae interfere with that flow. This is the cause of all disease.
That's goofy. If you happen to have a vertebra that is impinging on a nerve, you may have great success, but good luck with asthma or colitis.
The unscientific thinking often shows up in weird experimental treatments. I've been to a number of chiropractors and have been prescribed ox blood tablets (didn't fill that prescription), told to drink two gallons of water a day, and been examined with a "nervometer" ( pronounced nerve-O-meter). It's no wonder MDs rebel.
I think osteopathic surgeons should add the "adjustment" thing to their bag of tools, for appropriate conditions, as they might recommend therapeutic massage. Then there could be quality control and fewer quacks.
Chiropractic is a controversial health care system that originated in the United States in 1895. The National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) finds it remarkable that the chiropractic profession has existed for a century without having made a single notable contribution to the world's body of knowledge in the health sciences. The reason for this failure can be found in its origins and in the continued presence of antiscience attitudes. This includes the fields of the care and prevention of back pain and the value of spinal manipulative therapy (SMT), the areas in which chiropractic has dominated the health care services marketplace. Recent pronouncements on the value of manipulative therapy for back pain have involved medical research, not work done by doctors of chiropractic (DCs). DC publicists have been quick to grab the credit for these findings for marketing purposes, but deserve little credit. Some research projects are now under way, but chiropractic still does not play a significant role in researching the causes and treatment of the human ailments from which it derives most of its income.
In the Beginning . . .
Chiros (hand) + practos (practice) literally means "done by hand." Chiropractic was invented in 1895 by Daniel D. Palmer, a layperson in Davenport, Iowa [1]. Because he sold goldfish commercially, Palmer is referred to by some historians as a "fish monger." It is more interesting to know that he practiced magnetic healing beginning in the mid-1880s in Burlington, Iowa. Palmer searched for the single cause of all disease. The standard story about chiropractic's "discovery" is that Palmer believed he had found the single cause of disease when he "cured" the deafness of janitor Harvey Lillard by manipulating his spine. (Palmer may have learned spinal manipulation from Andrew Still's osteopathic school in Kirksville, Missouri). Lillard is said to have lost his hearing while working in a cramped, stooped position during which he felt something snap in his back.
Palmer's version of this event has always been disputed by Lillard's daughter, Valdeenia Lillard Simons. She says that her father told her that he was telling jokes to a friend in the hall outside Palmer's office and, Palmer, who had been reading, joined them. When Lillard reached the punch line, Palmer, laughing heartily, slapped Lillard on the back with the hand holding the heavy book he had been reading. A few days later, Lillard told Palmer that his hearing seemed better. Palmer then decided to explore manipulation as an expansion of his magnetic healing practice. Simons said "the compact was that if they can make [something of] it, then they both would share. But, it didn't happen." [2]
Chiropractic's true origin appears to have been of a more mystical nature than the Lillard tale denotes. Palmer was an active spiritualist and apparently believed that the idea of "replacing displaced vertebrae for the relief of human ills" came in a spiritualist séance through communication with the spirit of Dr. Jim Atkinson, a physician who had died 50 years earlier in Davenport [3]. As a young man, Palmer regularly walked the six or seven miles to the estate of his spiritualist mentor, William Drury [4]. It was one of Drury's followers who told him of her vision of a door with a sign on it reading "Dr. Palmer." She said that he one day would lecture in a large hall telling an audience about a new "revolutionary" method of healing the sick [5]. Predisposed to magnetic healing by his belief in spiritualism, Palmer was drawn to the practice by seeing the financial success of illiterate "Dr." Paul Caster of Ottumwa. Palmer's grandson described his technique:
He would develop a sense of being positive within his own body; sickness being negative. He would draw his hands over the area of the pain and with a sweeping motion stand aside, shaking his hands and fingers vigorously, taking away the pain as if it were drops of water [6].
Palmer began speculating that the flow of animal magnetism may become blocked by obstructions along the spine [7]. Palmer taught that chiropractic was "an educational, scientific, religious system" that "associates its practice, belief and knowledge with that of religion" and "imparts instruction relating both to this world and the world to come." "Chiropractic," Palmer stated, "sheds enlightenment upon physical life and spiritual existence, the latter being only a continuation of the former." [8] Individual chiropractors sometimes deny that they believe in Palmer's biotheological "Innate Intelligence," but when pressed as to their basis for practice, they must face the physiological facts described in a scientific brief on chiropractic:
If there is partial blockage of impulses in a nerve fibre . . . the impulse is transmitted more slowly in a zone of partial blockage, and resumes all its characteristics as soon as it reaches normal tissue. Thus, it is impossible for a partial blockage of nerve impulses in a particular zone to affect the flow, since the impulses would resume their normal flow [9].
Unsupported by science, chiropractors must either fall back on Palmer's pantheistic views or admit that the "subluxation" theory is erroneous. Without this theory, chiropractors are reduced to spinal manipulators whose primary treatment modality is shared by osteopaths, physiatrists, sports trainers, physical therapists, and others. Without subluxation theory, chiropractic's claim that it is a unique and comprehensive "alternative" to standard medicine is lost. D.D. Palmer had only modest success in promoting chiropractic. It was his son, B.J. Palmer, an eccentric promoter and Iowa radio industry pioneer, who developed chiropractic into a successful business enterprise.
Let's see, what reasons might there be for a university level chiropractic college?
1. Some chiropractors have good training and do good work. Most are charlatans. If the State of FL can control the training, perhaps all Florida chiropractors would do decent work.
2. It's a profit center for the state. FL could insist that chiropractors trained elsewhere could not be licensed in FL until they attended the state-approved school.
3. I think this is the most probable outcome. The attempt to install a chiro college at FSU will fail but will morph into a bill mandating that all chiropractors who practice in FL must attend chiro colleges approved by the state. Here's where big bucks start lining private pockets....Only supporters of Jeb will be allowed to run chiro colleges in FL that can certify chiropractors.
Actually US health care costs are out of control because of alleopathic physicians who give their patients with borderline high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and relatively minor off and on psychiatric ills expensive lifetime drugs requiring periodic monitoring and blood tests. All that is preventive medicine. I have mixed feeling about the allopathic docs doing this. However, as for preventive spinal manipulations, each one of which has a risk of stroke, that is quite a poor idea. Preventive medicine conducted by a chiropractor is a disgraceful attempt to rake in more fees.
I'll go to anyone who can fix me, whether or not she waves rattles and is coated in bear grease.
But chiropractors are not on MY approved list, as in no way would I allow anyone with any degree to jerk my bones around. It's too primitive for me.
You must thus think that some chiropractic schools teach correctly and some don't. Any examples of each? Or are you saying that the problem is failure of chiropractors to do what they were taught? Just curious.
Without doubt, you are correct in 95% of cases. I went to a chiropractor a couple of times and while he did not damage me, he did throw my entire system into shock. No thank you! Chiropractic is rough stuff. Bodies do not need to be jerked around. Gentle coaxing works better.
MD's and perhaps DO's take the Hippocratic Oath.
Hippocratic Oath -- Classical Version,,,,,exert:
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy.
Hippocratic Oath -- Modern Version (Post 1964),,,,exert:
Above all, I must not play at God.
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