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Chiropractic shown to be Safe for Children

In a literature research study conducted by the International Chiropractic Paediatric Association (ICPA) the risk of injury as a result of Chiropractic adjustments was shown to be extremely low for adults and even smaller for the paediatric patient. In reviewing 31 years of medical literature the ICPA found only one questionable report of injury to a child following Chiropractic care of a child. This ICPA concluded "the potential risk to children is so low it can not be accurately estimated". The above safety rate of Chiropractic care for children should be compared to the adverse reaction rate for medicine described in the article below.

Medicines That Commonly Harm Children

According to a Canadian study reported at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology, antibiotics and vaccines are the medicines that most often cause adverse reactions in children. "There is relatively little paediatric data on adverse reactions, which can range from rashes to potentially fatal hypersensitivity". More than 1,500 Canadian cases were reviewed between 1985 and 1995 by Sandra R. Knowles and her colleagues at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. In all, 1,800 drugs were implicated in this study.

The leading problems were caused from: Amoxicillin/Ampicillin with a 24% reaction rate, vaccines in general with a 19% reaction rate, Trimethoprim came in with 8%, Sulfamethoxazole (sulfa drug) at 8%, Erythromycin - was at 3%, and Penicillin also at 3% reaction rate.

Annual Death rate due to medicine is number ONE in Australia!

Adverse effects of medical treatment is the principal cause of death in people under 45 years of age, as well as being the leading cause of morbidity and permanent disability. Costing Australians $401 million dollars per year and consumed 16% of Australia’s total annual health system expenditure for injury. 17% of hospital admission results in adverse events, 5% results in death, and 50,000 people per year are permanently disabled as a result of their medical treatment (from The report, Health System Costs of Injury, Poisoning and Musculoskeletal Disorders in Australia 1993-1994).

Annual Death Rate Due to Medications Continues to Rise!

The following is reprinted from a recent article in the Boston Globe entitled, "Medication-Error Deaths Soar in U.S.," by Richard A. Knox,

"The incidence of death due to medication errors increased dramatically between 1983 and 1993 and shows no signs of abating, new research on the subject shows. Over the ten-year period in question, patient deaths due to medication leaped 260 percent overall, and 850 percent among persons receiving outpatient care. And these figures may represent "only the tip of the iceberg," according to David Phillips of U.C. at San Diego, who points out that many prescription error deaths aren't listed as such on death certificates. Death certificates from the ten-year period provided the raw data on which the findings are based.

Researchers involved in the study say that the increase in medication fatalities cannot be attributed simply to patients taking larger-than-prescribed doses of medication. Their comments are borne out by the fact that the sharpest increase in such deaths among outpatients occurred with the use of anaesthetics. Anaesthesia drugs are not self-administered, suggesting that the increase in outpatient care as part of overall cost-cutting measures among hospitals may be part of the problem. The study found that deaths due to anaesthetics among outpatients increased 400 percent compared to anaesthesia deaths occurring in hospitals. Surprisingly, the steep rise in medication deaths is not due to an increase in prescriptions, which during the ten-year period rose 39 percent, compared to the 260 percent increase in medication error deaths.

Compounding the problem, according to research conducted by Harvard University, is the fact that medication errors commonly occur even in the nation's highest-ranking teaching hospitals. The findings clearly indicate the need for a close re-examination of modern medicine's over-reliance on drug use and symptom care as primary approaches for treating illness."

Over 106,000 Drug Related Deaths per Year

The USA Today, Wednesday, April 15, 1998, page 1 finds a report on a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association addressing the subject of unintended side-effects of properly prescribed, properly administered medications. The authors estimate deaths from such events to exceed 106,000 deaths per year. To offer some perspective on this number--57,000 US soldiers died in the Vietnam War! Keep in mind, this number represents a completely different data set than Lucian Leape's estimate of 180,000 hospital based iatrogenic deaths per year. Those deaths are associated with errors, not side effects of properly prescribed and administered medications.

Over-the-counter ulcer medications linked to 16,500 deaths

In a December 1, 1998 story in the USA Today comes a story whose first sentence reads, "About 16,500 Americans died last year from bleeding stomach ulcers brought on by common medications known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, (NSAIDs)". For a comparison this was close to the number of deaths resulting from AIDS. Unfortunately for the victims bleeding stomach ulcers have no warning symptoms in 80% of the people who have them. Only 20% experience some symptoms such as abdominal pain or heartburn.

Some of the more common drugs that fit into this category are Motrin and Aleve as well as the prescription drug Relafen. While these drugs are some of the most common of their type on the market it seems the public does not recognize the danger. A recent national poll done by Roper Starch Worldwide showed that 75% of the people taking NSAIDs were either unaware, or unconcerned about the possible deadly effects. Unfortunately, those most at risk are those most likely to use the drug, including people with severe arthritis and those over 65 years of age.

What this article doesn’t mention is that a growing number of these individuals are seeking non-drug solutions such as chiropractic. This approach eliminates the chance of serious complications and adverse effects from these drugs.

Drugs not answer for Health & Wellness

In a feature article in the November 16, 1998 issue of the U.S.News & World Report, it was noted that drug usage is actually going up in the US. Drug companies are certainly not crying the blues because of the trend toward health and wellness. In fact they have shifted their emphasis in sales. More and more drug companies are pushing drug usage not only for treatment but for usage before any problems arise as a preventative. This mass marketing shift has paid off as prescriptions for drugs went up 400 million from 1993 to 1997, up to an astounding 2.4 billion prescriptions being dispensed in 1997!

This new approach markets drugs with the promise to prevent such things as heart attacks, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and impotence. Unfortunately, many of the drugs being marketed for healthy people to take as a preventative, were only tested on sick people. The article in U.S.News & World Report used the example of two drugs called Tambocor and Enkaid. These two drugs were routinely prescribed for years as a preventative of sudden heart attacks. Only after some time did a study of these drugs on healthy people reveal that the drug greatly increased the chance of sudden heart attacks when taken by healthy people. It is estimated that 50,000 people as a result of these drugs may have died before a halt was instituted. The bottom line is that "better living through chemistry" may exact a terrible price.

Drug Companies Marketing Aimed Directly At Consumers

A revolution in drug marketing and sales has occurred. In the early 1990’s a little known drug was introduced to medical practitioners for blood pressure. The drugs name was minoxidil. This drug, as all others before it, was only advertised in professional journals to medical practitioners. Then, when someone noticed that this drug actually stimulated some hair growth, things changed. This little known drug was soon known as Rogaine. And the marketing was not aimed solely at medical practitioners, but directly to the consumer. This changed the prescription drug game totally. Prior to that most consumers only saw over-the-counter drug advertisements. Now, the drug companies are advertising the prescription products right to the consumer.

The results are predictable. An article in the January 7, 1999, New England Journal of Medicine reports, "Prescription drugs are the fastest-growing component of personal health expenditures amounting to $78.9 billion in 1997". This rate of consumption is growing at an ever-increasing rate. In 1995, spending for prescriptions grew by 10.6 percent. In 1996, it grew by 13.2 percent, and in 1997, it continued the climb growing by 14.1 percent."

Based on the drug industries own figures, the top ten drug makers have spent 44% more money to advertise prescription drugs to consumers than to medical practitioners. Claritin, a well advertised drug is one example where the makers spent over $70 million in 1998 advertising to medical practitioners, while spending $183 million advertising to consumers.

The government, seeing the potential for abuse, has started to create guidelines for prescription drug advertisements. These guidelines are designed to inform consumers of major side effects of the advertised drugs, and give ways to get further information on their various reactions. Considering that children learn a lot about our world from television, we must consider if the drug companies message of "better living through drugs" is one we want our future generations to repeatedly see.

(Fortunately Chiropractic is a drugless health profession that deals with correcting causes and not just treating effects.)

"The number of funeral's we have performed has fallen dramatically"

The above is a quote appearing in the June 10, 2000 edition of the British Medical Journal (BMJ 2000;320:1561) and can be found at the following website: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7249/1561

The cause of the phenomenon is an eye opener. It is not related to some new insight in health care or even a new chiropractic technique being released on the population. Rather it is the consequence of a strike on the part of physicians in Israel where this surprising finding was noted!

"Death rates have dropped considerably in most of the country since physicians in public hospitals implemented a program of sanctions three months ago..."

Since the action was initiated by the Israel Medical Association on March 9, 2000 "hundreds of thousands of visits to outpatient clinics have been cancelled or postponed along with tens of thousands of elective operations."

"This month (May 2000) there were only 93 funerals compared with 153 in May 1999, 133 in the same month in 1998 and 139 in May 1997," said the director of one of Jerusalem's burial societies. According to the director of a competing burial society in Jerusalem "There definitely is a connection between the medical doctor's sanctions and fewer deaths. We saw the same thing in 1983." In 1983, the Israeli physicians took a similar action!

NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE APOLOGIZES OVER CONFLICT OF INTEREST - February 23, 2000  Web posted at: 5:06 PM EST (2206 GMT)

In an extraordinary apology to readers, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine admitted violating its financial conflict-of-interest policy 19 times over the past three years in its selection of medical practitioners to review new drug treatments.

The Boston-based weekly journal, considered one of the world's premier medical publications, disclosed in Thursday's issue that it let medical practitioners who had financial ties to the drug makers write the articles.

"It was carelessness on our part," Dr. Marcia Angell, editor in chief since September, said in an interview.

The internal review was prompted by a news report about one such violation last fall. The inquiry found 18 additional instances since January 1997.

The violations involve the journal's "Drug Therapy" feature, a series of reviews of the latest drug treatments for particular illnesses. In each case, the journal failed to disqualify authors even though they had revealed their financial ties up front, Angell said.

Angell said the journal solicits authors to write the reviews but is supposed to bar those who have directly or indirectly received "major research support" or payment as a consultant from companies that make drugs prominently discussed in those articles.

The "Drug Therapy" series is overseen by an outside editor, Dr. Alistair J.J. Wood, a pharmacology professor at Vanderbilt University.

Angell said Wood disqualified authors who personally received significant research funding from the makers of drugs discussed prominently in an article, but failed to disqualify authors whose institutions received such grants or authors who served as consultants to the drug companies. She said some in-house editors knew of the practice and overlooked it.

She said she suspects there were violations before 1997, too, but the in-house review went back only three years. Wood has been editing the series for about a decade.

In a letter to readers, Angell apologized for the lapse and said steps have been taken to ensure against any recurrence. She said no action was taken against Wood. He and a deputy editor who helps edit the series also signed the letter.

The letter listed the 18 newly uncovered articles along with the drug makers, which ranged from little-known biotech companies to pharmaceutical giants like Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck & Co., Pharmacia & Upjohn and Wyeth-Ayerst.

The journal regularly publishes original, unsolicited articles on clinical trials of particular drugs written by academic scientists who have received major research funding from a drug manufacturer involved. In those cases, the article notes those funding sources at the end.

Angell said the stricter policy for review articles is difficult to maintain because "there's so much connection between academia and the private sector now."

Study Shows More People Visiting Chiropractors

In the May issue of American Journal of Public Health, a study was published entitled "Use of Chiropractic Services from 1895 through 1991 in the United States and Canada". The conclusion of this study was that the number of visits to chiropractors has more than doubled in the past 20 years.

The study further reported that on average patients were between the ages of 30 and 50 years old. The study also showed that slightly more females than males sought Chiropractic care. According to Dr. Alan Adams, "This study is the most current description of demographic and clinical characteristics of patients seeking care from Chiropractors that has been published in the literature."

This study was conducted by the Rand Corporation and the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic in Santa Monica, California.

Study shows more people using "alternative" health care.

According to an article in the May 20 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), more people are turning toward what JAMA terms "Alternative Medicine". Traditionally, chiropractors do not use the term "Alternative Medicine" when referring to the profession of Chiropractic, since Chiropractic is a drugless natural approach to health. But it is interesting to note how the medical profession views Chiropractic and other health approaches they term "alternative".

The article says, "Research both in the United States and abroad suggests that significant numbers of people are involved with various forms of alternative medicine. However, the reasons for such use are, at present, poorly understood. Along with being more educated and reporting poorer health status, the majority of alternative medicine users appear to be doing so not so much as a result of being dissatisfied with conventional medicine but largely because they find these health care alternatives to be more congruent with their own values, beliefs, and philosophical orientations toward health and life." According to John A. Astin, Ph.D., a researcher at Stanford University's School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California who surveyed 1,035 randomly selected people, "Alternative medicine users tend to hold a philosophical orientation toward health that can be described as holistic and are more likely to have had some type of transformational experience that changed their world view in a significant way." …Sounds like a Chiropractic patient to me!

Understanding Subluxation

In simplest terms, a subluxation (a.k.a. Vertebral Subluxation) is when one or more of the bones of your spine (vertebrae) move out of position and put pressure on or irritate spinal nerves. Spinal nerves are the nerves that come out from between each of the bones in your spine. This pressure or irritation on the nerves then causes those nerves to malfunction and interfere with the signals travelling over those nerves.

Your nervous system controls and coordinates all the functions of your body. If you interfere with the signals travelling over nerves, parts of your body will not get the proper nerve messages and will not be able to function at 100% of their innate abilities. In other words, some part of your body will not be working properly

It is the responsibility of the Chiropractor to locate subluxations, and reduce or correct them. This is done through a series of Chiropractic adjustments specifically designed to correct the vertebral subluxations in your spine. Chiropractors are the only professionals who undergo years of training to be the experts at correcting subluxations.

Subluxations are really a combination of changes going on at the same time. These changes occur both in your spine and throughout your body. For this reason chiropractors often refer to vertebral subluxations as the "Vertebral Subluxation Complex", or "VSC" for short.

In the VSC, various things are happening inside your body simultaneously. These various changes, known as "components" are all part of the vertebral subluxation complex. Chiropractors commonly recognize five categories of components present in the VSC. These five are:

The osseous (bone) component is where the vertebrae are either out of position, not moving properly, or are undergoing physical changes such as degeneration. This component is sometimes known as kinesiopathology.

The Nerve Component is the malfunctioning of the nerve. Research has shown that only a small amount of pressure on spinal nerves can have a profound impact on the function of the nerves. This component is scientifically known as neuropathology.

The Muscle Component is also involved. Since the muscles help hold the vertebrae in place, and since nerves control the muscles themselves, muscles are an integral part of any VSC. In fact, muscles both effect, and are affected by the VSC. This component is known as myopathology.

The Soft Tissue Component is when you have misaligned vertebrae and pressure on nerves resulting in changes in the surrounding soft tissues. This means the tendons, ligaments, blood supply and other tissues undergo changes. These changes can occur at the point of the VSC or far away at some end point of the affected nerves. This component is also known as histopathology.

The Chemical Component is when all these components of the VSC are acting on your body, and therefore causing some degree of chemical changes. These chemical changes can be slight or massive depending of what parts of your body are affected by your subluxations. This component is often known as biochemical abnormalities.

Chiropractors have known about the dangers of subluxations for over one hundred years. Today, more scientific evidence is showing the dangers of subluxations and the health benefits of correcting them. To be truly healthy it is vital that your nerve system be functioning free of interference from subluxations. Chiropractors are the ONLY health professionals trained in the detection, location and correction of the VSC.

Midwife Deliveries Safer

In a related story from the Washington Post, results from a new federal study found babies delivered by certified nurse midwives were significantly less likely to die than those delivered by physicians. The study conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, and published in the Journal of Epidemiological and Community Health, was the first to compare infant mortality rate between physician attended births and those births attended by nurse midwives. After ruling our other outside factors, the study looked at 3.9 millions births in 1991. Results showed a 19% lower infant mortality rate for births attended by nurse midwives than those attended by physicians. In addition when the births were attended by nurse midwives, deaths that occur within the first 28 days of life were 33% lower, and the incidence of low birth-weight babies was 31 percent lower.

Authors of the study, and researchers, Marion F. Mac Dorman and Gopal K. Singh noted that part of the reason may be that the physicians care may be more "episodic" or transient, while the nurse midwives spend more time with the women in prenatal care and during labour.

Breast Fed Babies Have Lower Risk of Heart Disease

This title comes from the Healthmall Newsletter reporting on a study published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.  In that study investigators studied a group of 625 adults born in Amsterdam between 1943 and 1946, during the Dutch famine. Most study participants (83%) had been exclusively breast-fed during their hospital stay at birth, (at least 10 days) with the remainder being partially or completely bottle-fed with cows milk or buttermilk.  Blood samples were later obtained from these men and women when they were between 48 and 53 years old, in 1995 - 1996.

The researchers report that the group who had been partially bottle-fed, or had no breast feeding showed impaired insulin functioning.  When insulin function is disturbed, diabetes and other problems may result.  In addition, the bottle-fed group also had higher levels of cholesterol, indicating an increased risk for heart disease.

Breast Feeding, More is Better

From Reuters Health news service comes an article dated December 31, 1998 about breast feeding babies. The article starts by confirming what we have known for some time that infants who are fed only breast milk have stronger resistance to infection and therefore are at lowered risk of getting infections. Studies have shown that mother pass immunity-enhanced agent to their babies through breast milk. This results in babies less likely to suffer from respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses than those who are bottle-fed. Researchers found that the breast-fed babies had significantly less diarrhoea, vomiting, cough, and wheezing in the first six months of life.

The study also showed that those babies fed a higher portion of breast milk had higher resistance and lower rate of illness. Those babies fed a lower ratio of breast milk were increasingly more vulnerable to the illness mentioned. However, once the ratio of breast milk to other food hit a certain level where the food intake was higher than the breast milk, the results for the children were the same as those who were fed no breast milk at all.

This study points out that the more breast milk fed to the infant the better. But if the amount of breast milk drops below a certain level, the beneficial effects are lost.

Let kids get sick?

Philip Incao, M.D. says:  “One of the best ways to ensure your children's health is to allow them to get sick. At first hearing, this concept may sound outrageous. Yet standard childhood illnesses, such as measles, mumps, and even whooping cough, may be of key benefit to a child's developing immune system and it may be inadvisable to suppress these illnesses with immunizations. Evidence is also accumulating that routine childhood vaccinations may directly contribute to the emergence of chronic problems such as eczema, ear infections, asthma, and bowel inflammations.”

National Vaccine Information Center website at http://www.909shot.com

I’m Katie Glaeser, 15 years old.  I received a Presidential Academic Achievement Award for five years of straight A’s.  I received my last Hepatitis on December 10, 1998.  I became ill 13 days later.  My joints swelled up, I became achy, started having seizures and my vision deteriorated.  Nauseousness and headaches started immediately.  My kidneys stopped functioning and I gained twenty-five pounds overnight.  I haven’t been back to school since December 19th.  I can no longer play soccer, do things with my friends, go to school or do anything a normal 15 year old enjoys.  Light, smells and sound make the pain in my head worse.  I’m too exhausted to care much anymore.  I now have to wear glasses to correct my vision; but I still have only half of my normal vision.  I don’t have any desire for food; I’m becoming allergic to all kinds things.  My day centers on managing pain and exhaustion, not the normal stuff for a 15 yr. old. Source: http://avn.org.au/Children%27s%20Gallery/katie.htm

PRNewswire (5/26/2001)- The U.S. Government has paid more than $1 billion to compensate victims of vaccination injuries and continues to compile a huge database of all reported "adverse events" from vaccine administration, it was reported today by FedBuzz.com   The database, made available publicly for the first time on the Internet at http://www.fedbuzz.com  was instrumental in helping health officials detect bowel obstruction problems that led to the recent withdrawal of the rotavirus vaccine.

"Condemned to a wheelchair" A life restored through chiropractic care .  Source: http://www.chiropatient.net/shehyFP.htm

When this story was first published as a Chiropractic under oath pamphlet, Patrick Sheehy, 38 years of age and the father of two fine children, was a happily married man, holding down a responsible job with a government department.

As he will tell anyone willing to listen, it was the skill of an Oamaru Chiropractor which paved the way for his remarkable recovery.

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