Dogma, Not Science

American consumers have steadily rated hospitals, doctors and insurance companies as the lowest values for their money among the products and services they purchase. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spend on research and some very bright scientists, Mother Nature remains a mystery. Getting the sick well is part applied science and part art.

Critics of chiropractic like Steven Barrett,MD, fail miserably to recognize the daily flip-flops of allopathic medicine. One day coffee is no good; the next, it's good. Alcohol is bad, then it's okay (in moderation). Once, table salt was forbidden in hypertension cases; now it's acceptable. Margarine was prescribed instead of butter for years; now we know the dangers of hydrogenated fats on the cardiovascular system, and its noxious role in some cancers. Must we recall the horrible aftermath of thalidomide with its "flipper babies" to admit that allopathic medicine is not the science it proclaims?

The law of gravity in which an object falls to the surface of the earth occurs with the same specificity in the U.S., Europe or South Africa. Does the practice of allopathic medicine possess this specificity? Not hardly, when you realize the huge variation in allopathic practice for the same conditions. Women in Maine were four times more likely to undergo hysterectomy than those in New Hampshire. This same variation in care applies to back surgeries, coronary bypass surgery, etc.

Is this the science Dr. Barrett wants to protect? How about his own discipline of psychiatry? Does he suggest frontal lobotomies were the result of double-blinded studies performed at random on mental patients? Are he and other critics of chiropractic care prepared to review the abuse of antibiotics in our foods, animals and people? Remember, doctors of chiropractic do not prescribe drugs, so who will the critics blame?

My suggestion to all anti-chiropractic dogmatists is that they apply Koch's postulates to themselves before sermonizing against the right of Americans to choose alternative care to drugs/surgery when appropriate and desired by patients. It is long overdue for allopathic medicine to drop its pretense and admit that attending the sick is part science, part art and partly the body's inherent ability to heal itself.

Peer Review or Group Think

You may wonder how dogma can disguise itself so cleverly that it appears to be science. This question can be best answered by understanding the peer review of allopathic medicine. When researchers seek public funding before a panel of scientists, the panel's achievements and credentials are equal to those of the applicants. All too often, this evaluation is biased by group thinking. "Peers" are those who think alike and who seek to perpetuate their views of health/disease and cause/effect. Consequently, when proposals that differ and deviate from the peer reviewer's model are evaluated, they are rejected with scientific jargon: poor design, too small a sample size, inadequate controls, etc. Simply translated, the "peers" feel you have deviated from their norm.

Dogma is an old story for allopathic medicine. It has caused death to some great innovators such as Ignaz Semmelweis, who introduced septic practice to surgery when the surgeons of his day failed to wash their hands and their gowns were soaked with cadaveric debris. The father of anesthesia, W.T.G. Morton,DDS, was scoffed at by the famous Massachusetts General Hospital. He died without the respect he was due because the dogmatists of his day knew they were right and he was wrong. Time proved Dr. Morton right.

Dogma is alive and well in modern America. The doctrine of professional infallibility, with its arrogant and authoritarian attitude so common among physicians and surgeons, must give rise to public awareness that a major hazard exists with much of today's medicine and surgery.

Caveat emptor!