Chiropractic: The Victim’s Perspective (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), by George Magner, is an important and timely book that especially should be read by anyone who is either receiving or contemplating receiving chiropractic treatment. Magner is a retired agricultural researcher who, in the late ‘80s, visited an “upper cervical” chiropractor because of low back pain. After his sixth cervical “adjustment,” he experienced new pains in his neck and right shoulder and ringing in his ears (tinnitus). Over the next five months, Magner received treatment from three other chiropractors, his tinnitus worsened, and he developed numbness and tingling in his left foot. Apparently, he still had these problems when this book was completed in 1995. Magner is also the founder of Victims of Chiropractic, a support and information network concerned with chiropractic’s hazards.
Things that Go Bump in the Night?
After relating the nightmare of his own experience as a chiropractic patient, Magner summarizes the stories of 20 other chiropractic victims. For most of them, the consequences of chiropractic treatment — including stroke, paralysis, coma, and death — were graver than Magner’s problems. Reading that section reminded me of something more frightening: a study published by the Australian Chiropractic Association in the late 1980s. It detailed over 100 cases of stroke, paralysis, coma, and other serious problems that had resulted from chiropractic “adjustments.”
Magner provides a rather lively history of the founding of chiropractic at the turn of the century by D.D. Palmer, an itinerant “magnetic healer” in Iowa. Chiropractic has been mired in conflict and melodrama from its very beginnings. As every first-semester chiropractic student knows, the first chiropractic patient was Harvey Lillard. Supposedly, Lillard was “deaf” but recovered his ability to “hear as before” by receiving the premier chiropractic adjustment from D.D. Palmer. Although it often takes weeks and months for chiropractors to resolve common back complaints in their patients, “The Founder” allegedly cured deafness in one treatment — by adjusting the fourth thoracic segment. This segment has absolutely nothing to do with hearing, but learned-sounding chiropractors have expounded how sympathetic nerve reflexes could have traveled up the cervical chain ganglia affecting the circulation to the ear and thereby restored hearing. I call this “chirobabble.” In the last hundred years, many thousands of chiropractic patients must have had some degree of hearing impairment. The number of incontrovertible cures should have famed chiropractic as a treatment for auditory problems. Another question leaps from the Lillard case: How could a single “adjustment” have quickly and safely corrected a joint displacement that had persisted for seventeen years?
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