Medicine: It's All in the Spine

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The chiropractors were in trouble again last week. In Charleston, S.C., three patients had died after chiropractic treatments. M.D.s had never seen the like before: two of the patients had apparently succumbed to brain injuries.* The Journal of the American Medical Association printed the horrifying report.

A boat captain and a young woman had collapsed during chiropractic treatment —one for headaches, the other for hay fever. They were taken, unconscious, to the hospital at the Medical College of the State of South Carolina, died there a few hours later. The hospital doctors were puzzled: there were no signs of injury to the spine (the usual target of a chiropractor's manipulations), no clues to the cause of death. Autopsies on the patients' brains showed that the cerebellums were badly bruised and full of blood clots.

How could the brain, protected by the skull, have got such a beating? The investigators, Dr. Harold R. Pratt-Thomas and Dr. Knute E. Berger, admitted that they were baffled, but they strongly suspected that violent stretching and bending of the head might account for it. Said they: "[The blood vessels] could have been damaged by manipulations that forcibly brought them into contact with the cranial case."

Chiropractors were immediately and vocally outraged. Snapped a spokesman, Executive Secretary Sol Goldschmidt of the New York State Chiropractic Society: "The modern chiropractor does not use the strenuous adjustments of the past any more than the modern medical doctor practices bloodletting."

Subluxation Adjustment. Chiropractic, founded by an Iowa storekeeper named Daniel David Palmer, has flourished for 52 years in spite of considerable hell (from the A.M.A.) & high water. It now has some 30,000 U.S. practitioners, is recognized in 44 of the 48 states. (It is illegal, but is practiced nonetheless, in New York, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Louisiana).

Chiropractors (not to be confused with osteopaths, who often have medical degrees and base their treatments on correcting faulty body structure) still work on Founder Palmer's theory that most human ills derive from "subluxations" (dislocations) of the spinal column. Their treatment: "adjustment" (manipulation) of the spine, offered as a cure-all for a wide range of ailments, from scarlet fever to stomach ulcers.

Does it work? Medical doctors grudgingly admit that sometimes it does: like hypnotism, it may occasionally do wonders for a neurotic patient who believes he has been helped. Doctors like to cite a chiropractic patient's testimonial once quoted by a Chicago Tribune columnist: "Before taking chiropractic and electric treatments, I was so nervous that no one could sleep with me. After six treatments, anybody can sleep with me."