THE SAFEST HEALTH CARE PROFESSION
As some people may have heard in the media of the past, there is a small group of medical professionals who claim that chiropractic care can cause a cerebral vascular accident (stroke) from adjusting a person’s neck. There is presently a legal case in Toronto and only a couple of legal cases in the past 100 years that have made such claims. All cases to date have failed to show that their injuries were connected to chiropractic care.
It has, in fact been shown that over the past couple of decades there has been more of a “witch hunt” against chiropractic by certain people in the medical profession and nothing has ever been produced to show that chiropractic is unsafe.
In 1990, the American Medical Association (AMA) was found guilty in a very large court case of conspiring with other medical organizations in a lengthy, systematic, and deliberate plan to disseminate false and libellous information about the safety and efficacy of chiropractic. It also forbade its members to refer patients to chiropractors.
The court prohibited them from disseminating any more lies about chiropractic but the court could not stop the medical and pharmaceutical industries from using their influence to get the newspapers, magazines and television news to do that job for them. This is the prime reason you still see today people being given the false information that adjusting a person’s neck is dangerous.
In reality, adjusting a person’s spine is extremely safe. In over 100 years of chiropractic there has never been one person who has died as a result of chiropractic, as compared to the over 200,000 people every year who die as a result of medicine in the U.S. alone(as reported by the AMA).
The research that we presently have shows that there is only a 1 in 13 million chance of having a cerebral vascular accident from chiropractic care. To put this in perspective, you have a greater chance of being hit by lightning any day of your life, and you have a much greater chance of dying from taking aspirin.
Another measure of safety is that of malpractice rates that health care professionals pay for the same coverage. The insurance companies consider medical doctors the greatest risk and so they pay more for their coverage than any other health care profession. The profession that they consider the safest is chiropractic, and as a result, we pay the least amount per month for the same coverage. Chiropractors are considered even safer than optometrists by the insurance companies.
Therefore, by any measure that is real and shown to have any fact, you will find that chiropractic is considered to have the safest record of all the health care professions and some time in the future, this small group of medical professionals will stop fighting the enormous growth and public acceptance of the chiropractic profession.