FSU Provost Larry Abele, with the help of several chiropractors who have been hired by FSU, has made a commendable (but I think failed) effort to focus FSU's proposed chiropractic program on science. One of Provost Abele's claims, from both FSU's proposal and newspapers accounts, condemns some of the scientific claims of the chiropractic community, and attempts to assure FSU's faculty, the Board of Governors, and members of the public that FSU will not go down this path. For example, according to the proposal that Provost Abele purports to have prepared:
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.
As Provost Abele has elaborated, that Journal includes such "peer-reviewed science" as the benefits of spinal manipulation to promote fertility in infertile women, or to reverse multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease."
The Editor of the Journal of Vertebral Sublaxation Research, from the esteemed Life University (in Marietta, Georgia) responds to Provost Abele:
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.
In fact, this journal appears to be one of the most insecure scientific publications I have ever read. Talk about unfounded accusations!!!! -- How, exactly, is it moving this debate (or for that matter sound policy, let alone science) forward to make a comparison of the risks and benefits of various treatments based on malpractice costs? What a blatantly ridiculous claim. Here is a recent editorial from the Journal, for those who are not famliar with its approach to science -- apparently, email politics are its primary form of scientific persuasion. Whatever we think of the merits of the respective scientific claims of this political invective, it appears clear that, if FSU does establish as chiropractic program, there will be enourmous pressure from the profession to expand its curriculum to include some of the more suspect chiropractic treatments.
I think that all of this illustrates what a morass FSU is entering into if it continues to play around with a chiropractic program. This is just not a game for serious science -- no one who is interested in objective science and sound policy should make qualitative claims regarding health care based on malpractice claims. How, if at all, is this consistent with the mission and aspirations of a research university such as FSU???? Perhaps Florida's Board of Governors will tell us, as FSU and FSU's BOT has failed to.
Make love, not war!
Posted by: Lefmosess | January 12, 2008 at 05:24 PM
I gotta hand it to whoever wrote this, you've really kept me updated! Now, let's just hope that I can come across another blog just as interesting :)
Posted by: Term papers | November 05, 2009 at 02:17 AM