Dear Editor:
I do not usually write commentaries to articles I read in magazines or journals, but this time, I could not refrain.
I have just completed reading the article in the July 29, 94 issue, "Interview with Murray Katz, MD. While reading, I felt more and more as if I were reading a sci-fi, similar to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I found the article degrading, condescending, patronizing, and Dr. Katz has himself sold on the idea that he is helping the chiropractic profession.
I have one thing to say to him ... focus more on your own profession. A medical, holocaustic nightmare is emerging as antibiotics are becoming less effective in treatment of disease. Don't worry about our profession. We have been around a long time, and our future never looked better.
Bernadette Nichols, CA
Bradenton, Florida
"You do not 'spin the neck.'"
Dear Editor,
I would like to applaud Dr. Greg Plaugher for his article "Chiropractic and Cerebrovascular Accidents" in the 7-15-94 issue. I am a new graduate from Palmer who has been reading and collecting articles on CVA. Dr. Anthony Rosner, the research director of the FCER, also advised avoidance of rotary maneuvers in the May 1994 issue of the ACA Journal of Chiropractic. I agree with them both that one in one million odds is too high for us to ignore. Remember, one in one million odds do not dissuade millions of Americans from thinking they can win the lottery. And those odds will not ease your anguish when you have to face the family of a patient who was just disabled by your hands.
I would like to add that Gonstead is not the only technique that utilizes a P-A thrust which does not require rotation to tension. The double thumb prone move with a cervical drop, Pierce/Stillwagon, Activator, and both Pierce and Pettibon instrument adjusting are just a few. I highly recommend any one of those techniques.
For those who plan to continue to use diversified cervical technique, please take note of the advice I received from Dr. Richard Burns of Palmer. There are three simple steps to the "rotary break." You laterally bend the patient at that segment, then rotate at the segmental level. The adjustment is a linear thrust with a short quick triceps contraction that has no rotary component. You do not "spin the neck." With the patient supine, the head is held in flexion with the forehead uppermost. In reality, you can do this adjustment the same way a Gonstead "set" is done when all you see is the chin raise with your thrust. It is easy to get lazy and let all the steps blend together. I have seen people just spin the head with a trust and rattle two or three segments rather than the one segment that needed the "specific" adjustment.
So if you don't want to follow Dr. Plaugher's advise, please be as careful as you can with your cervical breaks. Your future and the health of your patients depends upon it.
Frank M. Painter, DC
Chicago, Illinois
A Lincolnesque Address on the Centennial of Chiropractic
Five score years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent the chiropractic profession, conceived in the mind, heart and hands of an intrepid investigator and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created with an innate power to heal themselves.
Through the years chiropractic has been engaged in a great struggle with those who would limit or destroy it. Testing whether this profession, or any profession so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met at a critical juncture in the history of chiropractic. We have come together to celebrate the birth of this profession, to honor the pioneers who nurtured it, and to chart the direction of this profession for generations to come. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But how can we honor the pioneers or the philosophy and science of chiropractic as it was conceived and developed, if we surrender, like Judas, the principles on which it was founded, for profit or for acceptance into today's medical community? How can we chart the future direction of chiropractic when we are now divided on what chiropractic really is?
The brave doctors, living and dead, who have struggled through the years have done so not to "manage" patients but to serve them by applying the laws of nature through the science and art of chiropractic. The doctors who built the profession knew that chiropractic worked, just as the people prior to Newton's theory knew that gravity worked.
The world will little note nor long remember the political rhetoric in which we engage today, but it can never forget the healing power that the chiropractic doctors have unleashed within their patients over the last 100 years. The chiropractic profession did not survive this seemingly endless battle because it had a strong organization or money from third-party payers. It flourished and prospered because chiropractors working with nature got sick people well, and chiropractic care was affordable.
Now it is for us, the current torchbearers of chiropractic, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which our devoted pioneers have thus far so nobly advance. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that we keep alive the principles of chiropractic and to continue to provide mankind an alternative to allopathic medicine, not to mimic it. Whether they believe that the vertebral subluxation is cause or effect in the dis-ease of human suffering, chiropractors still work with nature to restore balance and harmony in body, mind and spirit. It is time that we here highly resolve, that what our pioneering chiropractors fought to preserve and promote will not be put asunder. That this profession shall have a new birth of courage, and that the chiropractic profession, which brought mankind drugless and nonsurgical health care, shall not perish from the earth.
Wayne R. Fiscus, DC
Prescott, Arizona