My Medical Doctor Says That Chiropractors Break Spines!
Now, if that was truly the case, 30 million people every year would have broken spines. If Chiropractors fractured spines on a daily basis, Chiropractic wouldn’t be the largest Non-Medical healthcare profession in the world.
Misconceptions about Chiropractic will always arise from those who don’t have all the facts. To quote Fydor Dostoevsky, “Everything passes, only the truth remains.” This idea that Chiropractors “break bones” is a fallacy. Even those who wear white coats and have letters after their name are not immune to “fake news.”
Where did this idea come from that Chiropractors break spines?
It is a false notion that stemmed from a smear campaign created by the American Medical Association (AMA) in the early 1960s. It was once thought by medicine that if they couldn’t cure the patient, nothing or no one could. Medicine was the end all be all to health. If a patient sought help outside of medicine, the patient was doomed to fall prey to an “unscientific quack, cultist or charlatan.” And this is exactly what they called Chiropractors.
In 1963, the AMA created a “Committee on Quackery.” The committee sought a “containment of the chiropractic profession” that would “result in the decline of chiropractic.” Joseph Sabatier, the chairman of the committee said that “rabid dogs and chiropractors fit into about the same category…. Chiropractors were nice but they killed people.”
In 1987, after many lawsuits by Chiropractors, the U.S. District Courts confirmed that the AMA had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The U.S. Court asserted that “the AMA decided to contain and eliminate chiropractic as a profession” and that it was the AMA’s intent “to destroy a competitor.”
If I was one to point fingers and speak in hyperbolic tones, I could say that “medicine kills over 250,000 people a year.” I didn’t pick this number at random or conspire to other Chiropractors to create a campaign. I am only stating facts that came from medicine’s own research.
A 2016 study done at John Hopkins University Medical School found that medical intervention is the 3rd leading cause of death in America. This was a study that looked at 8 years of data and determined that over 250,000 deaths per year in the US are due to medical error. The second leading cause of death in America is cancer at 580,000 and the number one cause is heart disease at 611,000 deaths per year.
Using Dr. Barbara Stairfield’s calculation from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the medical error deaths can be broken down as such: 106,000 due to non-error, negative effects of drugs, 80,000 due to infections in hospitals, 45,000 due to other errors in hospitals, 12,000 due to unnecessary surgery and 7,000 from medication errors in hospitals. This is not the only study to come up with such large numbers.
In 2013, John James, PhD published an article in the Journal of Patient Safety. In the article, James examined the prevalence of iatrogenic deaths in America. Iatrogenic means “illness caused by medical examination or treatment.” James concluded that more than 400,000 patients die in hospitals each year due to preventable harm.
And it doesn’t end there. In 1994, Harvard School of Medicine professor Dr. Lucian Leape noted in his article series “Error in Medicine” that "American medicine kills 3 jumbo jets-worth of patients every 48 hours."
If Chiropractors broke spines on a consistent basis, you would imagine that our malpractice insurance would be through the roof. This though is not the case. Malpractice insurance is a type of professional liability insurance purchased by health care professionals. Coverage protects health care providers against patients who file suit against them. The suits usually involve a complaint of doctor negligence or intentional harm.
Not all health care professionals pay the same premiums. Premiums are based on factors such as intervention risk, the experience of the doctor, prior claims and the practicing state. The biggest factor involved in calculating premiums is risk; the dangers that surround a given intervention and the potential for injury sustained by the patient.
As a Chiropractor in the state of Ohio, my malpractice premium averages around $1,500 per year. A medical doctor in the state of Ohio can pay an average of $15,000 per year. Why the huge difference? The potential for risk. So if we look at malpractice insurance premiums, a medical doctor is more dangerous than a Chiropractor.
But, we still need to answer one important question: Can an adjustment fracture the spine?
One study looked at this question and found that it can take up to 3,200 Newtons to fracture the cervical spine. That is roughly 720 pounds of force. On average, a specific adjustment can range between 20-90 Newtons. That is around 4.5 to 20 pounds of force.
Looking at the numbers, we can see that the force of a specific adjustment could never come close to fracturing the cervical spine. When done by a properly educated and trained Chiropractor, an adjustment is one of the safest and least-injury-prone health interventions.
Even though we won our day in court and have the scientific research to back up our work, years of misinformation still propagate throughout medicine and society about Chiropractic. Facts might be on the side of Chiropractic, but belief systems don’t always line up with facts.
If you are still concerned about the safety of Chiropractic, all I ask is that you look at the facts and make a decision based on your perspective of the information. Not from medicine’s perspective. Not even from a Chiropractic perspective. But from the perspective that you want the best health choice for you and your family.
- Jarek Esarco, DC, CACCP
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Does a Chiropractic Adjustment Cause a Stroke?
Are Chiropractic Adjustments Safe?
Who Can and Can Not Get Adjusted?
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