Dr. McCoy responds to slam on JVSR research
January 2, 2005
Editor
St. Petersburg Times
PO Box 1121
St. Petersburg, FL 33731‑1121
To the Editor,
I have watched the recent events, name‑calling and
insults directed at my profession from FSU officials and in newspaper
editorials for several months now. Having grown up in the chiropractic
profession I am used to medical propaganda and insults directed at the
profession and have even become used to the bigotry from within the
chiropractic profession itself. It is for this reason that I have
refrained from responding to many of the ridiculous and ignorant
statements being spouted.
However, I was thrown into the briar patch this
weekend when I read the Times editorial that included a statement from
FSU's Provost, Lawrence Abele:
"Our first commitment is to a rigorous scientific
educational program, one that would explicitly reject some current
chiropractic activities, such as many of the articles published in the
Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research."
The quote was used to assert that FSU will have
"loftier academic standards" and that the FSU program will be a "rigorous
scientific educational program" in contrast to other chiropractic
colleges. Abele's contention is that most chiropractic programs are run by
uneducated, antiscientific quacks while FSU has apparently cornered the
market on "real doctors" and "real educators."
Abele's statement is curious for so many reasons.
Mostly because I doubt he has ever read a single research article
published in the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research (JVSR).
He's not a subscriber and he has never purchased an article. I doubt he
has even looked to see who is on the Editorial Board of the journal he has
just impugned. Those board members include the discoverer of the opiate
receptor, a former Harvard anatomist, an Oxford Scholar, microbiologists,
immunologists, engineers, health care attorneys, chiropractic researchers
and clinicians and yes ‑ even esteemed medical doctors. Dr. Abele owes
JVSR, each one of these hard working and respected individuals as well
as the authors whose work has been published by the journal an apology.
His indignation that chiropractors would have the
nerve to study such things as chiropractic's effects on infertility and
Parkinson's reveals the underlying issue that any research to come out of
a chiropractic program at FSU will no doubt remain locked securely in the
box of neck pain, back pain and headaches where organized medicine would
like to keep us.
It is interesting that Abele chose to single out
JVSR in regards to chiropractic peer reviewed research and that he
conveniently did not mention the Journal of Manipulative and
Physiological Therapeutics (JMPT) which is also a chiropractic
research journal. A cursory search of that journal's contents revealed
numerous articles on the treatment of non‑musculoskeletal disorders
through chiropractic including one article on ‑ of all things ‑‑
Parkinson's disease!
Could it be that Abele did not mention JMPT
because a chiropractor named Alan Adams who is FSU's faculty administrator
for chiropractic initiatives is associated with many of the members of the
Editorial Board of JMPT and also has a paper published in it?
As for the unfounded accusations being hurled around
by some of FSU's medical faculty that chiropractic is dangerous, I need
only point to the relative malpractice costs for the two professions as
evidence for which profession poses more of a public health threat.
The issue of comparing medical body counts with
chiropractic is really akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Evidence of
this threat is found in the medical profession's own literature. As early
as 1994 the Journal of the American Medical Association published
an article by Dr. Lucian Leape of Harvard Medical School titled: Error in
Medicine. In it he states that the number of injuries from medical error
is 180,000 deaths per year and "...the equivalent of three jumbo jet
crashes every 2 days."
According to a report by Public Citizen, medical
malpractice is the third leading cause of preventable death in the United
States ‑‑ ahead of traffic fatalities and firearm deaths. Of course this
is not surprising when, according to another medical doctor and researcher
David Eddy writing in the British Medical Journal, "...only about
15% of medical interventions are supported by scientific evidence." Eddy
goes further and states: "This is because only 1% of the articles in
medical journals are scientifically sound." Abele and his colleagues ought
to clean up their own backyard before chastising the chiropractic
profession.
Beyond the apology owed JVSR, Abele and the
Times owe an apology to all of the dedicated faculty and administrators
who teach in our chiropractic institutions and the students who attend
these schools. While it may be common that individual medical schools
require a Bachelor's degree in order for students to matriculate, the
decision for that requirement is left to the individual medical schools ‑‑
the same is true for chiropractic schools and the same is true for the
issue of grade point averages.
As for the conduct of research at chiropractic
institutions ‑‑ lets get something straight: Chiropractic institutions,
unlike medical schools such as FSU's, are tuition driven and are not the
beneficiaries of government funding for research and education like
medical schools are. The top 25 medical schools, for example, will receive
over $7 billion dollars from the NIH this year alone to conduct medical
research ‑‑ the chiropractic profession has received less than 20 million
dollars in 100 hundred years. To add insult to injury, medical schools
receive federal funding as high as $50,000.00 a year for each resident
they train. Chiropractic schools receive no such funding. Why?
Part of the answer dates back to 1987 when the AMA
was found guilty by Judge Susan Getzendanner of conspiring to destroy the
profession of chiropractic. The judge in the case issued a permanent
injunction against the AMA and its co‑conspirators because she did not
believe they would change their ways. The AMA's plan included containing
chiropractic schools and diverting federal research money from them.
The paucity of federal funding directed towards
chiropractic research and education are lingering effects of this
conspiracy and the chiropractic profession deserves accolades for the
significant strides it has made in the research and educational arena
given the obstacles thrown in its path.
Sincerely,
Dr. Matthew McCoy
Editor ‑‑ Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research
Director of Research ‑‑ Life University
Marietta, Georgia
