Thanks for the suggested materials.

I hope you don’t mind, but I added links in your fists submission, so people could review the materials you mentioned.

As an FYI, you can add URLs (or bolding, etc) in your posts by clicking on the link icon

I believe the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has a dramatic effect on any observation.

We can NEVER know how those people would have been IF they never received chiropractic care. All we can do is *try* to compare people with similar complaints who either saw a DC, or saw an MD. Even so, the statistics for those who DO receive chiropractic care is quite compelling.

There is also what is referred to as the “non-specific effects of care“, including that fuzzy-warm feeling you may have for your doctor, and the advice and attention they bestow.

Satisfaction surveys certainly rate DCs MUCH higher than their MD counterparts. Researchers are now placing much higher value on that “placebo-effect” than ever before.

Finally, regarding your comment about the “pathological changes in the joint“, I recently re-worked the What is The Chiropractic Subluxation? page, to make it much easier to review the neurologic and degenerative effects of joint fixation, and how chiropractic can help.

Regarding the originating article I think as chiropractors we have always believed that impaired motion can lead to pathological changes in the joint but, at this point it remains a hypothesis. A stepping stone. To be convincing, more work is needed.

What of the future? It seems to me that after years in the doldrums, we are now in a position to move forward in OA, and find new approaches to the control of the disease process and of pain and disability. But these advances will not come if we only use the biological approaches that have so successfully led to the control of inflammatory arthritis. The OA process is driven by abnormal mechanical forces on a joint, so the answer must come from biomechanics as much as biology.

Proof-of concept studies are already available, through, for example, the improvements that can occur in both symptoms and joint pathology following osteotomy or joint distraction to unload damaged areas of the joint.[19] Pain and disability require a biopsychosocial and holistic approach to the multiple problems of older people. As with any chronic disease, management of OA is complex and needs individualizing.[20]

This is another section of this opinion article in Rheumatology 2011 journal. I find it interesting and very (modern) chiropractic . Providing optimal biomechanics to the kinetic chain may reduce/slow down this process (even when asymptomatic). Of course this is not even close to an easy sale if you will. More often then not in our culture it has to be very very broken before attempted to be fixed. This is why I’m personally frustrated when a person comes in with a condition that I can treat but will really require 8-10 visits but the insurance chiropractor wants me to perform yet another miracle of doing it in 2 visits.

The joint is a mechanical structure, and the key to understanding OA is abnormal mechanical stress: joint failure is the pathophysiological response of a synovial joint to mechanical insult, and the attempt of the joint to repair the damage caused by local abnormalities in force/unit area. The abnormalities in cytokines, degradative enzymes, toxic radicals and the like, which are being studied as the cause of OA, are rather the result of this attempted repair.[9, 11] Therefore, thinking about OA is moving from biochemistry of the articular cartilage to the mechanobiology of the whole joint.

OA is joint failure rather than a disease.

Joint failure is driven by abnormal joint loading.

This is part of an article I read and bookmarked I received from MedScape. The article is entitled Developments in Osteoarthritis: Perception is Everything. (NOTE: Registration at Medscape is free)

It’s about an article from the Rheumatology 2011 Journal. Good opinion article. I feel it offers some logic foe “maintenance” care.