Fraud, Fake Treatments & Fatalities: The Dark Side of Chiropractic Care
The U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate recently reintroduced legislation to increase access to Medicare-covered services provided by chiropractors. Last year, the US chiropractic market size was worth $13.13 Billion. By the end of the decade, it will be worth over $18 billion. Each year, a whopping 35 million Americans seek chiropractic care. But why? It’s a questionable science full of questionable characters. . .
Chiropractic care was the original holistic medicine. As Dr. Steven Novella has noted, what used to be fraud is now known as holistic medicine (more on fraud in a minute). Dr. Edzard Ernst, a retired British-German physician and researcher, has expertly demonstrated the many ways in which chiropractic treatments are rooted not in science, but in mystical concepts.
Chiropractic medicine was founded by Daniel David Palmer, a known fraudster who performed the first chiropractic adjustment in 1895. Born in Ontario, Canada, Palmer moved to Iowa at the age of 20. Upon arrival, he started practicing magnetic healing, a pseudoscientific practice that involves placing magnets on various body parts for the purpose of pain relief. A devoted spiritualist, Palmer insisted that the core tenets of chiropractic treatment were “passed along” to him by the spirit of Jim Atkinson, a doctor who died 50 years earlier. In other words, Palmer “learned” about spinal adjustments from a paranormal entity. . .
Dr. Ernst told me we should be skeptical of what chiropractors are offering, largely because the whole practice was founded “by a deluded charlatan, who insisted that all human diseases are due to subluxations of the spine” . . .
Dr. William T. Jarvis famously referred to chiropractic as “the most significant nonscientific health-care delivery system in the United States.” Comparing the chiropractic community to a cult, Dr. Jarvis wondered, somewhat incredulously, why chiropractors are licensed to practice in all 50 US states. The entire profession, he warned, “should be viewed as a societal problem, not simply as a competitor of regular health-care.” (Read more from “Fraud, Fake Treatments & Fatalities: The Dark Side of Chiropractic Care” HERE)
Delete Facebook, Delete Twitter, Follow Restoring Liberty and Joe Miller at gab HERE.
