The AMA has joined the TMA (Texas Medical Association) in trying to challenge Texas chiropractor’s “right” to diagnose. They are doing this under the guise of trying to halt expansions of the scope of practice of various alternative pratitioners. The AMA News web site currently brags that they are involved in fighting more than 300 scope-increasing bills around the country.

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The members of Chiro.Org’s Board met last night for our yearly Board meeting.

To celebrate our almost 15 years of success, we decided to donate $2500 towards chiropractic research. This year’s gifts includes a $1250. contribution to AECC (Anglo European College of Chiropractic’s Research Department), to further basic chiropractic research, and another $1250 to the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association to support research demonstrating the benefits of chiropractic care for children.

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Retraction of 1998 Wakefield Study May Not Sway Those Who Fear Vaccine-Autism Link
Source ABC News

It was the scientific paper that served as a central pillar for the idea that vaccination could increase children’s risk of developing autism.

Now, with a formal retraction from the Lancet, the medical journal which in 1998 published this piece of research by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, most researchers will view the study as if it had never been published in the first place.

In a statement explaining its retraction of Wakefield’s paper, the Lancet said: “Following the judgment of the U.K. General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practice Panel on Jan. 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect … in particular, the claims in the original paper that children were ‘consecutively referred’ and that investigations were ‘approved’ by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.”

“The Lancet is an enormously prestigious journal with worldwide circulation, so its action of repudiation is very important,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chair of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s Department of Preventive Medicine in Nashville, Tenn. “The retraction puts another nail in the coffin of this awful, painfully erroneous study.”

But the retraction is unlikely to close the Pandora’s Box that the Wakefield study opened, other vaccination experts said.

“Unfortunately, the idea that vaccines cause autism is already out there and the damage has already been done,” said Robert Field, professor of Health Management and Policy at the Drexel University School of Public Health in Philadelphia. “Years of research have clearly disproven a vaccine-autism link, yet many people continue to believe in it. If all of that research hasn’t changed their minds, the Lancet’s retraction is not likely to make much difference.”

Dr. Gregory Poland, editor-in-chief of the journal VACCINE and director of the Mayo Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minn., called the Lancet’s action merely “procedural.”

“What is more important is that an investigator, on the basis of false pretenses, published a paper and propelled a controversial hypothesis forward that led to decisions among individuals and groups to reject vaccination, with resultant outbreaks of these diseases,” he said. “The results are highly significant: millions spent needlessly, hundreds of thousands — maybe even millions — unimmunized, and a fog of suspicion cast upon vaccines.”

On Jan. 28, the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council (GMC) found Wakefield guilty of acting unethically during the time he conducted the famous case report of 12 children that questioned if a childhood vaccine caused a new form of autism.

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These learned articles by Dr. Schafer can also be easily found again by selecting the EDUCATION Category, on the right-hand side of this page, just below Recent Comments. We hope you will find them of interest.

Here are all 29 Chapters from his different books, available exclusively on Chiro.Org:

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Recent reports of individuals suffering strokes proximal to receiving chiropractic care are sensationalized by the media all out of proportion to their actual frequency. Although medicine openly admits that tens of thousands die needlessly from medical care, even from things as innocous as venipuncture, that doesn’t excuse chiropractors from the duty to protect their patients.

The Stroke and Chiropractic Page was crafted to keep the profession abreast of information that may help prevent strokes in our patients. I am including the Introduction to that page here, because it reviews those physical findings that may predict whether a new or existing patient is in the prodromal state of stroke onset. so that we can refer them for co-management. I hope you all will read this information closely.

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We would all like to thank Dr. Richard C. Schafer, DC, PhD, FICC for his lifetime commitment to the profession. In the future we will continue to add materials from RC’s copyrighted books for your use.

The following is Chapter 4 from RC’s bestselling book:
“Chiropractic Physical and Spinal Diagnosis”

The following materials are provided as a service to our profession. There is no charge for individuals to copy and file these materials. However, they cannot be sold or used in any group or commercial venture without written permission from the copyright older.

Chapter 4:   PATIENT PROFILE AND CASE HISTORY

   If one had to sum up the doctor’s role in one term, it would probably be “decision maker”. In practice, decisions involving diagnostics, therapeutics, economics, and human relations must be made throughout each day. Every telephone call and every direct conversation entail decisions of one sort or another which can have far-reaching effects.

Part One: Case History Methodology

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When you want to find something online, it can be overwhelming to get thousands of responses. A typical example is a search for the term “chiropractic” on Google. You will get 14,200,000 responses, in no particular order. Who’s got the time to weed through that?

That’s why something called Boolian Logic can help you get the information you want faster. The idea is to string together several search words into a “search string”. Below is a list of the 4 Boolian “operators”, with a simple explanation of how you can use them to do a much more specific search.

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Use the slider at the Genetic Science Learning Center to view a stunning example of scale.

Some cells are visible to the unaided eye

The smallest objects that the unaided human eye can see are about 0.1 mm long. That means that under the right conditions, you might be able to see an ameoba proteus, a human egg, and a paramecium without using magnification. A magnifying glass can help you to see them more clearly, but they will still look tiny.

Smaller cells are easily visible under a light microscope. It’s even possible to make out structures within the cell, such as the nucleus, mitochondria and chloroplasts. Light microscopes use a system of lenses to magnify an image. The power of a light microscope is limited by the wavelength of visible light, which is about 500 nm. The most powerful light microscopes can resolve bacteria but not viruses.

Study Shows Molecule Can Infiltrate Immune Cells to Treat Rheumatoid Arthritis
Source WebMD

Jan. 28, 2010 – A ghostly “suicide” drug wafts into immune cells in joints, making the cells self-destruct and reducing rheumatoid arthritis in mice.

The drug, technically a BH3 mimetic dubbed TAT-BH3, is a man-made molecule. One part of the molecule lets it drift through cell walls. The other part mimics a chemical signal missing in the macrophage immune cells that build up inside joints afflicted by rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

Because they are missing this signal, macrophages in RA joints don’t die off as they are supposed to do. They live on, destroying bone and inflaming the joint, says Harris Perlman, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Chicago’s Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“In RA, there is this persistent inflammation that never shuts down. Part of the reason is these macrophages are missing a protein they need to die off,” Perlman tells WebMD. “So this drug says OK, let’s replace this protein. Let’s bring back the death pathway.”

Perhaps because normal cells aren’t clinging to life like the zombie macrophages involved in RA, the drug doesn’t kill normal macrophages. The drug was not toxic to mice.

“The most recent research (Neck Pain Task Force Report of the Bone and Joint Decade 2000-2010, a study sanctioned by the United Nations and the World Health Organization) indicates neck manipulation is a safe and effective form of health care,” according to Matt Pagano, DC, chiropractic profession spokesperson.

Source ACA Online

According to long-awaited results from a congressionally mandated pilot project testing the feasibility of expanding chiropractic services in the Medicare program, patients have a high rate of satisfaction with the care they receive from doctors of chiropractic.

When asked to rate their satisfaction on a 10-point scale, 87 percent of patients in the study gave their doctor of chiropractic a level of 8 or higher. What’s more, 56 percent of those patients rated their chiropractor with a perfect 10.

Contributing to that satisfaction was the attention given to patients’ needs and the accessibility of chiropractic care. Patients reported that doctors of chiropractic listened to them carefully and spent sufficient time with them. Some 95 percent said they had to wait no longer than one week for appointments.

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Source Tom Blackwell, National Post

A new court ruling has again called into question a widely used but controversial chiropractic treatment, concluding that a Newfoundland practitioner made a patient deaf in one ear and caused other debilitating injuries by performing a neck manipulation on him.

The judge in the civil suit found the chiropractor negligent and will decide later what compensation to award Abe Gallant, who says he had to leave his $80,000-a-year job because of the damage.

The decision follows a series of public inquiries and inquests that have blamed cervical manipulation for strokes, some of them fatal, and the filing of a $500-million class action suit in Alberta that targeted the allegedly dangerous chiropractic therapy.

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You may enjoy reading this Case Study, published recently by Joel Alcantara, D.C., the research director for the ICPA (International Chiropractic Pediatric Association).

A 24 yr-old pregnant patient presented with chronic migraine headaches, which she had since age of 12. Previous care included osteopathy, physical therapy, medications and massage with unsuccessful outcome. Her medical care had consisted of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication with codeine, at the maximum amount permitted during a pregnancy (i.e., 1000mg per day) as well as caffeine intake through coffee to potentiate the medication. This resulted in only minor and temporary relief.

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Source CBC News

The World Health Organization will review accusations it overstated the risks of the H1N1 virus.

The most recent complaints about WHO’s handling of the pandemic came from the Council of Europe, a political forum, where last week parliamentarian Wolfgang Wodarg called H1N1 a “false pandemic.” In November 2009, Dr. Richard Schabas, Ontario’s former chief medical officer of health, referred to it as a “dud pandemic.”

The European concern is that WHO may have overstated the dangers of the pandemic because of pressure from pharmaceutical companies that produce swine flu vaccines.

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