Most doctors don't ask you to make an appointment in the next few days. In my own experience, all chiropractors ask you to make another appointment. I suspect it helps to keep the money rolling in.

Its going to be all black and white on this thread. Perhaps its
time that universities got involved in separating science from
voodoo. Because its not all just black or white.

Where I live a great many people have lower back problems. Our
conventional doctors frankly can't help them. The good chiropracters
are very busy, because they can in fact make a difference.

So we need universities to separate the science from voodoo within
chiropractic.

Its a bit the same with asthma. All that doctors can do is prescribe
more puffer packs and steroids. Yet numerous people have stopped
having asthma problems, when they tried the Buteyko method, closed
their mouths and learned to breathe through their nose.

So it seems to me that universities could indeed play a role in
separating fact from fiction. Just look what happened, when
somebody did some proper research on the cause of stomach ulcers. For years
doctors told us that it was stress, they were clearly wrong.

Modern drugs and surgery medicine are superb at crisis intervention of all kinds, patching people up after accidents, and more often than not diagnosis of symptoms and pathological conditions. Other than that it is largely a failure in that it rarely if ever cures people of their dis-ease. It doesn't know how. Doesnt even have a comprehensive model of how the healing process might work, or a holistic concept of what optimum health might look like. A model which takes the subtle influence of mind, emotions, and psyche into account. Including quite possibly, each persons astrological chart, and numerological patterning too.

Yes it quite often relieves people of their painful and bothersome symptoms, but it never restores people to a sense of balanced well-being.

In most and even all cases, a simple and even radical change of diet can do much to both relieve people of both their acute and chronic dis-ease symptoms. And then if applied consistently and diligently, enable the body to use its own intrinsic biological wisdom to heal itself. The corollary being that most people basically eat their way to a dis-eased condition, and that unless people change their diet no fundamental healing is possible.

"It is disturbing to see federal tax dollars spent on supporting non-science (nonsense) on our campuses and subsidising the rebate private health insurers provide for pseudoscience."

Indeed. It is disturbing that our tax-money goes into creating a bias in support of ANY teaching, be it scientific or otherwise.

If non-science is so bad, then let the students vote with their feet and let the patients vote with their wallet. Lend students a fixed sum for their studies; Give the afflicted a fixed sum to cure themselves, then let them shop around for what they believe is appropriate for them.

(and as for private-health-insurance, neither subsidize it, nor make it compulsory via the medicare-surcharge: allow people to insure themselves or to choose a larger self-participation excess)

The medical profession is based on an irrational philosophy. Though the facts are mostly scientific, the goals are ideologically based (notwithstanding the greed factor) on materialist/atheist/humanist grounds.

At the moment, the government is in collusion with the AMA mafia, legislating according to their every whim to give them powers similar to any of the middle-ages' old guilds.

Most benefits of pseudo-science are not proven - but one is: it keeps people away from medical doctors!

Yabby, John allows that chiropractic has benefits for back problems - it's the rest of it that isn't scientific. I've also heard him on radio discussing acupuncture, and it appears breaking the skin does produce physical benefits - but the meridians are unscientific.

So whether you agree with him or not, it's a more nuanced view than nothing outside of conventional medicine is of any benefit.

The Doctor doth protest too much methinks ... Medicine is hardly a precise science - which is why people die or become very ill from misdiagnosis, adverse reaction to medications and infection linked to medical procedures.

At the same time many many more are cured or relieved. Simple fact is humans are a complicated organism with immense diversity throughout the species. If it were not so, there would be just one highly effective efficient "HEALING SCIENCE".

I used to believe chiropractic was witch doctor stuff, that was my training. Then suffering a 'bad back' that wasn't responding to the first line anti-inflammatories, at a colleagues urging I visited her Chiro - in trepidation, stories of 'paralysis and irrepairable damage' dancing in my head. I entered his practice incapacitated and in serious pain. I left walking straight with pain reduced at least 75%. The effect was no placebo. Since then I have been an enthusiastic supporter of chiropractic treatment and seen it help many people - some of whom I've referred. Research data would indicate that most people obtain a benefit. Of those that don't, incidence of further harm is very low. There are aspects of the 'theory' that I find somewhat incredulous but I can also point to a number of modern medical practices for which there is little benefit obtained but the financial outcomes for the practitioners are immense ... Continued next post