April 2005, Vol. 15, Iss. 2

Table of Contents

Altered Cervical Lordosis and DJD • Chiropractor Invents Car Seat Headpiece • DACBRs Cause Professional Embarrassment at RAC • Eight Major Aberrant Forms of the Lumbo-Pelvic Spine • European Spine Journal to Publish 6th CBP® Clinical Control Trial • Evidence Based or Not • Glutamate/Aspartame - Pain and Your Brain • Greg Buchanan Donates $30,000 to CBP® Nonprofit • Inappropriate Characterization of CBP® Technique • Missed Appointments and Patient Education • Money, Taxes, Life and Practice • Palmer College Takes Alumni Group to Court • PosturePrint™ Research with ICA • Presenting Defendable Care Options to Patients • Published Papers Near 81 • Resign or be Terminated • Thermography: Renewed Interest • Using Silence to Communicate • Whiplash Injuries: Pathophysiology, Diagnosis, Medical Management and Prognosis

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Evidence Based - Or Not

by Thomas O. Morgan, D.C., B.S., FICA, FPAC

Dr. Tom Morgan and his wife, Mary Ann, are founders of Volume Practice Seminars. Their goal is to help doctors and staff achieve volume practices, become debt free, and live spiritually disciplined lives that glorify God.

               There are politicians in chiropractic who want to take us somewhere we don’t want to go, or somewhere we don’t need to go. In the past, I have served as president of a state association, and a state board, as well as being a member of a college and national association boards — so I know how they think. There is nothing we can do about some things these boards do. I remember when members of the state board were smug that advertising was over, because all of the states had passed anti-advertising regulations and laws. However, the Bates decision made all their work moot. Still, even today with every medic and medical corporations advertising, our state boards keep making “rules” against DC’s advertising. Most of these regulations would not hold up in court, but this does not stop them from feeling like they are controlling their colleagues down the street. It’s a power thing. What about the smug groups on the National Board and CCE who keep passing regulations so they can keep electing themselves; thereby controlling a large segment of the profession, without any peers? I believe that their smugness may someday catch up with them.

              “Evidence Based” is supposed to be a research word. However, it is also a political word that we keep hearing today. Evidence based, like the phrase “outcome assessments,” is a term with which no one can argue. They represent the conclusion of our research projects. CBP® has more published research papers than any group in chiropractic. All of these Papers describe the “evidence” of their intent — “Proof” if you will, which draws doctors like us to this technique.

              However, these CBP® publications do not often appear in recent “Evidence-Based” guidelines. Why not you ask? It is because this research is subluxation-based; it supports our Chiropractic Philosophy, which these politicians (who do not practice) do not want,... so they ignore these research publications when doing their “Evidence-Based” searches for publications.

              What we are dealing with in this essay is what the politicians and some college leaders are doing with this term “evidence based.” This is a purposeful position that smacks of elitism by setting themselves apart as being better than anyone else, smarter, or more “special,” from other colleges and associations. Don’t be fooled. This is a subtle ploy to discredit all subluxation research, philosophy and wellness care entities in our profession. The truth, as I see it in my 40 years in chiropractic, is that the non-subluxation politicians have always been looking for a way to discredit our philosophy, subluxation basis, and wellness care programs. What is the danger in this? Why would they want to do this? After decades of hearing the medics bash us because of our anecdotal claims to healing, our politicians started waving the “Evidence Based” flag for acceptance. However, these politicians are late because now organized medicine has changed their own political “word.”

              There is an unbiased paper that has just been published in the journal “Social Science and Medicine,”1 entitled “Evidence-based Medicine and its Implications for the Profession of Chiropractic,” by Dr. Yvonne Villanueva-Russell. Dr. Russell is a sociologist at Texas A&M University. She warns us not to be too quick to think being Evidence Based will advance our profession. Quantum physics and alternative care popularity has caused medicine to start spending some of their vast research money on researching another dimension — the spiritual effect if you will — in healing. “Quantum Physics” (QP) began this new concept from their research. The new concept is: “if it works, even though we don’t understand it, we will do it and accept it.” What we see work in our offices (even though we don’t have complete double blind, refereed journal publications to explain completely why each patient had a favorable response), we believe in it. The politicians who disdain subluxation terminology will not go to where quantum physics wants to take us. This destination is namely vitalism and innate philosophy. What QP is telling us — is that one of the most important parts of care is our experience and success with our techniques and clinical results. In other words, what we believe in — and the more you believe in what you are doing and seeing (results); the more power and enthusiasm you put into teaching patients what you are doing for them, the GREATER the response and your success in practice. In other words, this is exactly what DD, BJ, Vint Logan, Leo Spears, and “FCB-PSI” Jimmy Parker, said over and over again to us who would listen.

              When you see results from your adjustment, believe in full faith that innate changed the patient for the better. This BELIEF system you develop multiplies and translates into a successful practice the more you teach it, and promote it. Somehow you become stronger and more successful as a healer. The Touch & Tell System I teach is direct proof of the QP phenomenon. Dr. Price, it’s still Afferent and Efferent — neurology — i.e. cells that wire together fire together. Now that I know about changing the “neural net” in patients, I am convinced that it proves why my Touch & Tell System changed my patients to the point where I could have a “chiropractic conversation” with them. My patient care intent has always been to constantly pour new information into the patient about innate, subluxations, causes and corrections verses symptoms and treatments. I try to give BIG pictures, and/or images, that the patient can hold onto to understand innate healing and the care plan. I visualize innate making that patient normal again. It is this central focus and belief that changes the patients’ “neural net.” Most important is that we change the “Net” physiologically with the adjustment. Our adjustment changes weight bearing, movement patterns, mechano-receptors, nociceptors, hard and soft tissue physiology.

              With QP research, we can concentrate more than ever before on changing our patients physically, mentally and spiritually with the adjustment and the Touch &Tell System. This system is the power behind my success. Even the new genome research has changed our belief that we can’t add on new genes. The facts show that we pick up new genes from our environment, our spouses, and even from the groups of people we hang around with. If I had every patient hanging around with me, I would make a dent on this drug infested world. In the 70’s we knew it was effective to advertise the slogan “Are you tired of purple pills, red pills, green pills? TRY CHIROPRACTIC” because this slogan somehow made a dent in the medical “net.” Let’s pull those ads back out and maybe we can make a dent on new drug stores being built on every corner of every town in America.

              Subluxation-based leaders have always pushed us to be out in front of the medics, to out work them, and out perform them in the healing arena. “WE GET RESULTS AND THAT’S WHAT COUNTS,” is still one of my favorite ads. Of course this infuriated our politicians. One of our famous politicians gave a speech in Davenport not long ago, where he said that even though he has seen his patients get well from asthma, dysmenoria, cystitis, Krone’s disease, and other visceral disorders, he could not tell anyone about this fact because our research has not caught up to the point that it is evidence based. He also stated that anecdotal evidence is not professional, and that we should only tell about our proven back pain studies. The students almost booed him off the stage. This man has adjusted patients for over four decades and still doesn’t get it.

              The QP approach today would put these mechanistic, reductionists back with the horse and buggy days. Medicine is using large research sums studying why prayer heals the patient. They are even funding research about how the type music played in the hospital rooms affects the comfort, attitude and healing of the patient. I saw on 60 Minutes last week, that these medical scientists (M.D.s, Ph.D.s) were using dogs to sniff urine dishes — the dog could pick out the one with the malignant cells about 41% of the time. What is that? Could that, in any possible way, be construed as “Evidence based?” Maybe the future diagnostic parameters will include dogs sniffing out cancer cells? Every doctor has witnessed in caring for patients, that when we say, or even our body language suggests that we can’t help, the patient goes flat, usually never returns, and usually tells everyone that chiropractic can’t help him or her. This is QP in reverse. It’s not hard for me as a coach, to encourage my doctors to look at the positive point of our clinical results and keep the patient focused on the innate point of healing. They CAN understand “innate’s” work in the healing process. I have known from early on in my clinician life that the better adjustor I became, the greater the RESULTS. It is our RESULTS that have kept us in the marketplace for over 100 years. All of us quantum physics based chiropractors will always support evidence-based studies, and I believe that we badly need more of them. That is why I contributed to chiropractic research every month for years. Maybe I am more faithful in this than most. However, even our research must have both clinical and QP projects, or we won’t get to explain “scientific” innate until medicine explains it first.

              In a recent article “The Evolution of Chiropractic”2 Dr. Marc Heller states that at his college in Chicago, his diagnostics and science education were excellent, but in clinic, the doctors fostered potential weaknesses in treatment because they could not accept the subluxation. When they added on mobilization of joints as just another treatment option, with their skepticism, the student became weak, techniques were not specific - and the outcomes negative. This doctor found out the facts — like all of us — that the harder he works in seminars and techniques, the more positive about the results he becomes, and the greater is his success.

              Everyone is raving about the new documentary/drama, “What the Bleep do We Know?”3 This is the QP world we can stare at, and wonder about. This independent film has an interview with a chiropractor at the end. Everyone says he is the hero, but he could, in fact, be any of us. Not long ago I heard lectures at Homecoming at Life University by QP doctors; Bruce Lipton, Ph.D. and Candice Pert, Ph.D. Dr. Pert started off her speech by saying that we chiropractors have had it right all along. From her cell biology work, the conclusion is that healing is all about mind, body, spirit. When cell biologists get deeper and deeper into the molecules, they know that there is an innate intelligence behind physiology. All science must ultimately embrace spirituality to the extent that we see God (universal intelligence) on course, and that the entire universe could fold up like a roadmap if God would just speak a word. Everything is NOW — past, present and future — are all one piece to Him. There is no start, no finish. It is one piece. It’s ALL now to Him. That’s why He is God and we are not.

              So let’s appeal to the evidence based people, to integrate with us innate people, to accept subluxation-based research when published. Let’s wire and fire together — this can be our new unity.

References

              1. Dr. Yvonne Villanueva-Russell, “Evidence-based Medicine and its Implications for the Profession of Chiropractic.” Social Science and medicine 2005, vol 60.

              2. Dr. Marc Heller, “The Evolution of Chiropractic”. Dynamic Chiropractic Jan 15, 2005, pp 18.