History of Chiropractic in New Zealand
Dear Editor:
In New Zealand, the Hamblin Chiropractic Research Fund Trust is sponsoring research into the history of the chiropractic profession in this country.
The research is being done by Mr. Craig Wills. Craig has a master's of social science in history from the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand.
It is envisioned that the study will be done in three parts:
1895-1945 (end of World War II)
1945-1979 (registration in the 1960s and Commission of Inquiry)
1979-Onwards
If any practitioners or their families have information including letters and photographs of, and about New Zealanders in the United States and Canada, especially pre-1945, it would be most appreciated if it could be sent to New Zealand.
Would you please send this information or photocopies to:
Justin Vodane, B.Soc.Sci., B.App.Sci.
Chiropractor
53 Anglesea Street
Hamilton, New Zealand
Justin Vodane, DC
Hamilton, New Zealand
Dear Editor:
Dr. Lendon Smith's recent commentary, "He made the most of his life...but he didn't choose it" (Dynamic Chiropractic, August 13, 1993, p.18), was provocative. I'm sure I don't know why some folks are homosexual, anymore than I understand why some are heterosexual. Despite Dr. Smith's suggestion that sodium (in males) and potassium (in females) are determiners of gender preferences, I am unaware that these hypotheses have much of any experimental substantiation. Perhaps Dr. Smith could provide some citations to the relevant literature?
I appreciate Dr. Smith's distress with his medical (psychoanalytic) education concerning gender preferences, and his willingness to bring the issue to the attention of chiropractors. Hopefully, members of this profession will support the right of the individual to listen to his/her own Innate! Enuf said!
Joseph C. Keating Jr., PhD
Portland, Oregon
Dear Editor:
It's nice to see Deborah Pate taking responsibility for her actions. Maybe if more people did this the world would be a healthier place.
Mitchel Friedman, DC
Acton, Massachusetts
Dear Editor:
Volume 11, Number 16 (July 30) issue of Dynamic Chiropractic arrived today and in the nick of time. One class I teach at the University of Bridgeport College of Chiropractic is ethics. The article: "Chiropractic Team Treats Top in Track and Field" will provide interesting discussion during the class. This is because tomorrow, the class is going to go over the Code of Ethics of the 1991 USA/Mobil Outdoor Track & Field Championships Sports Medicine Staff which I wrote as the medical director. All of the approximately 300 members of my staff for the championships had to sign copies. The Athletics Congress (TAC), which recently changed its name to USA Track and Field, adopted this code.
The code was written after hearing "horror" stories from my fellow members of TAC's National Sports Medicine Committee. They told me that at previous national championships there were health care providers (most often chiropractors) who would keep a record of everyone they treated and then would publish this somewhere. There was a chiropractor who convinced an elite competitor to come to his office for some type of athletic performance testing. This doctor then published the results of the athlete's test, WITH THE ATHLETE'S NAME AND WITHOUT THE ATHLETE'S PERMISSION. This led me to write paragraph C of the code: Members of the 1991 USA/Mobil Outdoor Track and Field Championships Sports Medicine Staff are reminded that all medical information concerning athletes treated by the medical staff, including the mere fact that you have attended to the athlete, is privileged and not to be disclosed to any persons outside of the Sports Medicine Staff.
Confidentiality, the doctor-patient privilege, is a specific example of the right of privacy, derived from the basic ethical principle of autonomy. In the Chiropractic Oath the concept of confidentiality is expressed as: "I will keep inviolate all things revealed to me as a physician." It is possible that the athletes mentioned in the article did give their permission for the doctors involved to publish their names. But even if they did, is it appropriate?
It is articles like these that give our profession a bad reputation within the medical profession. Do not get me wrong, I do not feel that we should kowtow to the medical profession. However, publishing names of athletes that you treated and their specific health problems can result in the medics stridently protesting to meet/event officials that chiropractic should not be involved. This has happened and the medical profession has the influence, especially with evidence like these types of articles to keep us out!
If you think that just because it was published in a chiropractic "tabloid," that no one else will see, guess again! I often get calls from an MD friend of mine, such an article has been published. His colleagues want to know why he would even consider working at all, let alone cooperatively, as he does, with people like us.
I have submitted quite a few press releases to Dynamic Chiropractic, ACA Sports Council's Sports Talk, and to Chiropractic Sports Medicine about my participation at various events. There is great value in letting the profession know about the fact that you have worked at these big events. We all get to see that chiropractic is moving out of the shadows of the medical profession. We feel validated as professionals because the "important" people in society like what we do. We become motivated to work harder to try to achieve the "greatness" we see our colleagues achieve (if they can do it so can I).
I congratulate doctors Clark, Emerson, Forcum, Gorman for getting the opportunity to work at the Championships. I too, know the elation of working with the best in the country and wanting to tell everyone what you have done. Let us all remember that we, as a profession, are sitting in a glass bubble with microscopes always trained on us. We have to be twice as good to be thought of as half as good. Little slip-ups from overexuberance can cost us.
Stephen Perle, DC, CCSP
Assistant Professor of Clinical Sciences
University of Bridgeport, College of Chiropractic
Dear Editor:
As a practicing chiropractor for nearly eleven years, I was appalled when I read your commentary in regards to the issue of vaccination and how it applies to the proposed national health reform.
It is significantly apparent that you are grossly uninformed as to the seriousness of vaccination complications.
Abundant information is available on the controversy and risks of vaccination. I strongly suggest you research this matter before you casually address this issue as many otherwise intelligent people do.
To state that vaccination has a solid position scientifically is tremendously overrated. I challenge you to demonstrate such objective data and please publish it in the future for those who are informed or should I say uninformed.
No responsible, informed individual doubts the effectiveness of antibody production with the vaccination, however, the concern is what sacrifices are made to undeveloped immune systems and nervous systems?
Scientific evidence suggests association to cerebral palsy, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, allergies, asthma, and diabetes to mention a few, are linked to vaccinations.
Please take a moment and think about the abundance of these problems in our society, many of which are epidemic to our children. Please explain to me how this couldn't or doesn't concern you. Encouraging numerous health care providers to sell their soul, their principle, their livelihood and most importantly our children to a worthless administration who is hosted by a man who wears an empty suit, and whose wife has become a queen, is outrageous!
On the moral side, it should concern you and other intelligent people that a choice is not available to those innocent, helpless children who must subject their health and well being to vaccination.
If this area of reform has an opportunity to manifest further, how many more rights will be taken away? Does one not get a job if they're not vaccinated? Does one lose a job? Please comment. You seem to feel comfortable with being railroaded.
The unfortunate aspect of chiropractic is that we are so misunderstood, so under appreciated, but so sorely needed by the masses.
Growth has tediously come through much wasted time and money in catering to deaf and greedy politicians.
Major chiropractic organizations are scrambling to get a sliver of pie, a bone, from a program that should in its entirety be rejected.
When do people like you, and so-called leaders in our profession, open your eyes and realize that public education is the key, not padding the wallets of fat cat politicians. Then and only then can Americans enjoy a true freedom of choice.
Getting back to the issue of vaccinations ...
Time and time again various vaccination programs have demonstrated their ineffectiveness and failure.
How many people still get the flu after receiving their seasonal flu shot? Most respond by saying, "Good thing I got my shot, otherwise I probably would have really gotten sick!"
How effective was the swine flu vaccination program?
How many children were vaccinated that came down with measles, in the highly publicized measles outbreaks? I guess one needs to continually be injected to insure immunity, or maybe, they don't make them like they used to!
I don't feel this issue, Mr. Petersen, is necessarily a chiropractic renegade matter, however, a grossly uninformed public matter that has the majority of brainwashed by the all powerful pharmaceutical companies.
Once again, I take exception to your commentary, and pray that you research this issue more thoroughly and retract your cavalier remarks on this matter.
Daniel A. Kutschman, DC
Shrewsbury, New Jersey
Dear Editor:
I am writing because I am alarmed by the self-destructive process the chiropractic profession is involved in, and how we may miss opportunities that are presented to us.
I am a "mixer" chiropractor (LACC 1988) who accepts the vertebral subluxation complex as a basis for my identity as a doctor, but who considers it only a part of my therapeutic abilities, because it solely addresses the passive aspect of the healing process. In order to view a holistic picture, active re-construction must be performed by the patient (with the help of nutrition). This has to be directed by a truly knowledgeable doctor (of chiropractic), and not haphazardly with the aid of an exercise sheet, for this reason I am following a CCSP and will attend CCRP courses.
Instead of bickering about our little world (straight/mixer), we should open our eyes to reality; the outside world does not care if we are one or the other type, it does care about what we can do for them to lead healthy lives if possible without recourse to the traditional allopathic procedures. We have been focusing on ourselves so much as to have developed tunnel vision.
We often hear that our worst enemy is ourselves, and I adhere to that precept, but I also see dangers from the outside. These foes are not the MDs or DOs but the PTs and OTs. I suggest that you read one of their rehab publications (such as Rehab Management), and see what is occurring in a field which we are led to believe we have qualifications: ergonomics, rehabilitation, work injuries ... I never received any specific instruction on these subjects in chiropractic college, not even as an elective course. I was taught about biomechanics and basically left to figure out on my own how this knowledge could apply to my work injury patients. These patients had subluxations indeed, but the injuries were sustained due to a specific sequence of physical forces exerted upon them.
The question, therefore, is how can chiropractic position itself to keep a place as a musculoskeletal expert if we persist on concentrating on one "facet" (pardon the pun) only an not expand our true knowledge of the entire picture. PTs are marketing themselves to industry directly or to medical doctors as the ones who can handle what I call "ergo-pathology," (and will even "manipulate" the spine if they like it -- not as crudely as most of you think). These people don't have our overall education level and therefore a more limited license, but they are gaining ground in a field where we could have a better understanding and a more effective approach. Just imagine if in the future, the PTs gain an expansion of their current M.S. level scope of practice, the possibilities are endless.
I think that our collective energy should be placed in education of both chiropractor and society instead of trying to convert the pseudo-medics or followers of the "church of subluxation." Specific courses should be taught in applied biomechanics dealing with real-life situations such as work injuries, physical rehabilitation should be taught in all colleges so that we can know what we are talking about instead of blowing hot air. Chiropractors should also be more aggressive in finding new ways to utilize our attitudes, because nobody is right if the status quo leads to the degeneration of our profession.
I believe that there are colleagues out there who share my point of view, but I don't see much debate about it in the open. I invite my colleagues to address any comments or criticisms: 2414 S. Fairview St., Ste. 107, Santa Ana, CA 92704.
Marc E. Poli, DC
Santa Ana, California
When I graduated from chiropractic college in 1981 and started practice, I heard it all, and very little was positive. “You are a quack; you do not know what a subluxation is; you couldn’t get into a real health care program, so you chose the one that is slightly above a mail-order degree; you have no proof that chiropractic works; Are you really licensed?”, and so much more.
| Digital Exclusive
A central challenge in creating our identity is that chiropractic is a method of care, not a technique or procedure. This is an important concept for us to promote. Our patients are treated with lifestyle modification, exercise, nutritional supplements, diet and a whole-body approach to accelerate the natural healing process. We are not simply CMT providers.
The results of a global survey released late last year (2023) unveiled some startling findings among medical and nursing students. The “Clinician of the Future: 2023 Education Edition” surveyed 2,212 students, of which 446 were in the United States, from 91 countries.
