We Get Letters

"...the strength of a spine, supple and well articulated..."

Gentlemen,

The 106th Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena was unusually
fantastic because this year I was in it. The float of the
Centennial Foundation was there expressing "unity without
uniformity" in the chiropractic world. The American eagle expressed
the strength of a spine, supple and well articulated for
chiropractic to attain 100 years of services to humanity.

My part in this festivity is 50 years of practice, having graduated
June 15, 1943 from Palmer. Now retired, I still receive patients at
my residence.

Your journal Dynamic Chiropractic has informed me on time for the
Rose Parade. Thank you for your civility.

Gerard Bellavance, DC
Trois-Rivieres, Quebec

Dear Colleagues,

It is time that we stand up and protect ourselves from those who detract from our profession. Just today I head national radio medical mogul Dean Edell read the claims of a product marketed by a chiropractor. This product was "Small Water." Excuse me, "Small Water"?

I would like to thank and support G. Douglas Andersen for his insight and courage to speak up on such issues. There must be a swift and firm action against those who would use the title of chiropractor to sell products such as Small Water. It is clear that times have changed. Schooling and research has created a new brand of chiropractor. No longer do we need to invent theories of what it is we do. No longer do we need to preach and make fraudulent claims. If the old school or the new and corrupt chiropractors continue to embarrass and pull us down, soon there will be no chiropractors left.

Daniel Buch, BS, DC
Oakland, California

Dear Editor,

Regarding: "Childhood Practice, Childhood Disease -- Update on the Pertussis in DPT Vaccine" by CCCKC students Earl Malone and Todd Stephens, Jan. 2, 1995 issue.

I can't believe the simplistic approach to a complicated issue. We are being asked to embrace a procedure which is not devoid of high risk and extreme complications. The references chosen by Drs. Malone and Stephens are all glorious pro references. Did they choose these because they supported their issue? Did they also review the literature supporting the other view?

What about the preservatives in the vaccine: the phenols, formaldehyde, mercury, aluminum, acetone, and glycerine -- all considered toxic to the body? What about by passing the normal portal of injury and going directly to the blood stream? What about the manipulation of statistics to make vaccines look more impressive than history shows? What about the vaccinated getting the diseases being vaccinated against?

Refusal of vaccination is not the choice everyone can make, but at least give everyone the choice to make it.

Suggested reading: Vaccination -- 100 Years of Orthodox Research, Viera Scheibner What about Immunization, Cynthia Cournoyer A Shot in the Dark, Coulter, Fisher

John Needler, DC
Columbus Grove, Ohio

Three nights ago I became a father for the first time. In preparing to be a parent, I did an extensive amount of reading on vaccinations. The conclusion that I came to was that, as a man of science and conscience, I could in no way justify subjecting my children to a series of injections of foreign material into their bloodstreams.

The Center for Disease Control statistics make it clear that the majority of diseases that are now routinely vaccinated against were disappearing before either the cause was discovered or the vaccine developed. There was no change in the statistical curve of morbidity after the introduction of the vaccine whatsoever. But what about polio, you say? Polio had appeared in the population three separate times during this century, and had died out the previous times, without the introduction of a vaccine. In fact there are studies which show that other vaccination campaigns were thought to be a cause of polio, which was only seen in industrialized nations. Other data was manipulated to make it appear that polio had disappeared as a result of vaccinations. Studies of recent measles epidemics make it clear that vaccination, even to the full extent recommended by health officials, is no guarantee of immunity. Believing that vaccinations have caused the disappearance of diseases is a little like my walking into a town that has been suffering from a great drought, watching it begin to rain, and claiming the credit for having created the rain. Just because I was there does not make me the cause of it.

Even if we suspend our belief in statistics and attribute the fading of these diseases to vaccination programs, don't we also have to acknowledge what we might be creating in their stead? In the years since vaccination programs were introduced, the major new diseases that have faced mankind seem to have one thread in common: they are all auto-immune disorders where the body begins to fail to recognize its own cellular material and attacks itself, believing its own cellular contents to be foreign. Isn't there the slightest chance that many of these conditions are being caused, or at least exacerbated by actual foreign proteins injected into humans, which are now incorporated in the body's DNA structures? Where are the studies to disprove this? Where are the long-term comparisons of vaccinated and nonvaccinated adults? Once we accepted the untested hypothesis that vaccinations were good, we began to make them mandatory, without considering the possible long-term effects. Autism was never seen in the population until after massive vaccination campaigns were begun. It was first seen in wealthier populations, those who at the time were the only ones who could afford to vaccinate. Now we have an epidemic of learning disabled children in our population. Could there be a connection?

Observation of life teaches me that there will always be diseases. Viruses and bacteria are just like human beings, they will mutate to survive, and the strongest will survive and become stronger. The more we try to kill them the more virulent they will become, since they reproduce and mutate much more quickly than our ability to destroy them could ever possibly become. Newsweek recently devoted a front page article to the inevitable failure of this type of approach to disease. Chiropractic is a profession which deals with health, which is a very different animal. In helping to normalize function in the nervous system, we are aiding the body in its adaptation to whatever stresses it is exposed to. This, along with proper nutrition, hygiene, exercise, rest, and any number of emotional, mental and spiritual components, creates wholeness in an organism, which is what health truly is. Artificially trying to create immunity in a human being is the equivalent of having a national defense which does not let its army practice full scale maneuvers. When the actual emergency comes, the army will not be prepared, or worse still, not even able to recognize the true enemy.

We will die someday, whether from a disease, an accident, or just plain wearing out. It is natural for us to want to prevent pain and suffering. When I look at my new daughter, I know that each time she cries, my impulse is to try and make it better. When I was younger, I watched my mother, stricken with polio, as she summoned her internal resources and made her recovery the defining incident of courage in her adult life. I know that there will be times that my child will suffer; there will be times that the best thing I can do is allow her work through the suffering to a greater degree of health and wholeness. There will be no vaccinations put in my children's bodies.

Jan Kirschner, DC
Boulder, Colorado

I've been in chiropractic practice for 40 years and am running in the last quarter of the game of life. I don't sound off very often, but when I do, I mean for it to count for something.

Just last night a well know medical commentator chastised beauticians for washing their clients hair with their head and necks in extension. He cleverly suggested that manipulation of the neck by chiropractors could put their patients at risk. How long are we going to stick our heads in the sand and hope and pray that attacks like this will just go away? I'm here to tell you that they will not go away until we do something positive to turn this around. I don't mean by quoting statistics that show how safe neck manipulation is compared to some medical procedures, or make excuses trying to cover for the profession. We are going to have to face the fact that a number of our fellow chiropractors are maladjusting the neck day in and day out. I have consistently gotten feedback from patients saying such things as: "That chiropractor nearly tore my head off. I will never go back"; "I have had a headache ever since that chiropractor popped my neck." Now with all the bad press we are getting, a significant number of patients are now saying, "Doctor, please don't pop my neck." They are scared to death.

Competent cervical adjusting is the chiropractor's bread and butter. How many of our patients come in with wry necks, headache, cervicalgia, upper respiratory problems etc., and respond well to a good cervical adjustment? Are we going to let our enemies make it illegal for us to adjust the cervicals, or bombard us with so much bad press that our patients will shun us like the plague?

My suggested solution to the problem is first of all that we recognize that there is a problem here. Forty or 50 years ago, the late Dr. M.B. DeJarnett, founder of the sacro occipital technic system of chiropractic, taught us that in adjusting or manipulating the cervicals, the doctor should always bring the head and neck up into flexion before any kind of adjustment is made, thus giving maximum protection to the vertebral artery. Back in the early days, chiropractic college educators considered people like DeJarnett as just crazy technic peddlers, so very few of us were listening.

Today there is a wide variety of technics developed for adjusting the cervicals, some good and some bad, even atrocious. One of the most insane systems I have ever seen in print was where the doctor would take a rolled up towel, place it in the middle of the supine patients neck and give it a jerk. Whoopee, anything goes.

The next step would be to gather together some of the finest minds in chiropractic, develop some guidelines for safe cervical adjusting and outlaw any procedure that would put the patient at risk. With proper biomechanics in mind, the chiropractor should be taught cervical adjusting with the art, preciseness and skill of a surgeon. Our profession has never been one to standardize, but if anything needs standardization, cervical adjusting does.

The third step would be to publicize what we are doing. Let's admit that there are some chiropractors maladjusting the neck, but that the profession is taking steps to correct it. People will forgive a mistake, but what they won't forgive is to repeatedly make the same mistake.

Our privilege to adjust the neck is in jeopardy. Let's do something right now before it is too late. I hope every chiropractor on the planet earth reads this.

James Parmele, DC
Columbus, Kansas