Chiropractic Stroke Myth

Chiropractic doesn’t cause stroke.  There has been decades of false information that has created a false fear.  Dr Chester Wilks first sued the AMA for years of trying to contain and eliminate Chiropractic care.  When you read the actual published and indexed research you will find the same conclusion. #healthy815

www.rockforddc.com

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- Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus. And welcome to another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor"."Ask the Chiropractor" is a little thing that we do here where people have a question about chiropractic and wanting to get an answer. And so, I always encourage you, if you want to answer about chiropractic, you ask the chiropractor. If you have a question about your teeth, I encourage you to talk to your dentist. If you have a question about your feet, I recommend you talk to a podiatrist. A lot of times, you'll see a segment about chiropractic or a thing about chiropractic and afterwards, go to someone's family doctor and tell them to check with a family doctor first. I'm the first one to tell you that your family doctor has no education on what chiropractors do or don't do. That is not something that's covered in medical school because it's not medicine. So, medical doctors are really good medical doctors. Medical doctors are really bad chiropractors. So, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus. I'm a graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic. I serve as the official team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs. And I also do a lot of other legislative stuff. And so, I come on here, people send me a question or ask me a question. And I do a video here or a little podcast every week. Let's get into it. This week is another hot topic, a topic I don't like talking about. I've done it so many times, but it keeps coming up over and over again, but let's hit it. Can a chiropractic adjustment cause a stroke? Absolutely (not). This is a question that gets asked all the time and absolutely not, absolutely. We've done a lot of research and science on this, but let's talk about the big pitch here. Let me start from the beginning. Work our way backwards and tell you why this is happening, and how this all came to be. The first thing I wanna start off is talking about the late Dr. Chester Wilk. He's a chiropractor here in Illinois, like myself. And back in the late '80s, early '90s, Dr. Chester Wilk sued the American Medical Association for saying bad things about chiropractic. They were trying to contain and eliminate chiropractic. They were trying to destroy our profession. And in the process, they said lots of lies and misconceptions about it. And I'm not just saying this is a bias thing. This was an actual court case that went to court. And Dr. Chester Wilk won. You can look it up. W-I-L-K-S versus the AMA. And there's a new book out called,

"Contain and Eliminate: 2:24

How the AMA Tried to Single-Handedly Destroy Chiropractic". Decades. Decades of lies about chiropractic. Decades of lies about chiropractic. And how dangerous chiropractic is was spread by the AMA for a long, long time. And we all know that there's the truth in what people perceive to be the truth. And after decades of lying about chiropractic, they've created as many false truths about chiropractic. The most damaging of course, is being that if you were to get your neck adjusted, this could cause the artery in your neck to hemorrhage, you to have a stroke and possibly not survive the chiropractic care. This is what's often said. And what they did recently, I know about 10 years ago, the American Heart Association, the American Stroke Association tried to bring this thing up again. And now, just recently, in an article in "People" magazine, they're trying to talk about it again. And I'm gonna break it down for you. I'm just gonna tell you the facts and the science. Here it is. They try to say that people had this stroke with this artery and they wanted to investigate why it happened. So, they went to these people and they asked them, had you gone to a chiropractor? And there's about 20% of them that said, yes, they'd gone to a chiropractor. So, when this artery in your neck should hemorrhage, one of the main symptoms of this is severe agonizing neck pain. The general public, when they have lower back pain or neck pain, about 20% of them seek out care from a chiropractor. So, they were able to prove that 20% of the people go to a chiropractor when they have the severe neck pain. Because of this, they decided to just go ahead and jump to the conclusion that chiropractors must be causing this because 20% of them went to a chiropractor. Now, I guess, the other 80%, we just write off, we don't pay attention to, we don't acknowledge. We just only focused to the 20%. Well, the problem was this. This was the only question that was asked. This is the only thing they did. They said, okay, well, you had a stroke. Before you stroke, did you have horrible neck pain? Yes. Well, I would say almost all of them have severe neck pain. That's one of the symptoms of the stroke is severe neck pain. And again, with people with severe neck pain, where do they go? A lot of them, 20% of the population typically goes to a chiropractor to get their situation figured out. So, to have population with neck pain, have 20% go to the chiropractor. This is not a rare, weird thing. So, this is what the study showed that that day said, okay, well, 20% of people that go to a chiropractor have a stroke. The chiropractic must be part of the stroke factor. Well, there's a chiropractic research team guy named Cassidy. C-A-S-S-I-D-Y, Cassidy. If you go to the PubMed and what PubMed is, PubMed is the gold standard for medical research. Now, chiropractic does general healthcare research and PubMed does tons of tons of research and scrutiny to make sure what you're presenting is accurate. And the American Heart Association, the American Stroke Association's article on chiropractic and stroke did not qualify for PubMed. They did not get index. They were rejected because they only asked the one question. So, Cassidy did another study where he went around and asked the same question. Hey, you had a vertebral artery stroke. Had you been to a chiropractor? And he found the number was the same. However, he also found nearly 40% of them went to their family doctor also. So, if 20% goes to the chiropractor and they caused it, and 40% goes to the medical doctor, by using the same logic of the American Heart Association, the American Stroke Association use, one should conclude that going the medical doctor could be twice as dangerous. They also found out that almost 90% of them wore socks. They found all kinds of things. A hundred percent of them were clothed. There's just no causation of this and back and forth. Now, are there... So, Cassidy was able to easily prove that their study was bogus and their study is no good. So, now, what we have is we have another issue where somebody went to the chiropractor with severe neck pain, got chiropractic care. Afterwards, went to the hospital and the hospital figured out they had had a stroke. And so, go ahead they drew a conclusion that the chiropractor must have caused a stroke. But we've got multiple PubMed index articles and journals showing where we use cadavers, where they go in with the idea to purposely try to rip the artery, purposely tried to cause a stroke in a cadaver. Now, why a cadaver? Well, no right-minded person would ever sign up for a study that says, can you try to give me a stroke? So, we can't do with live people. There's no double-blind radical control study where people sign up to possibly have a stroke, that this wouldn't be ethical at all to do. So, we have to use cadavers and we use other things and try to purposely create this injury. And we cannot do it. It's never been done. It's never been replicated. And so, we have to look at that. We also have to look at the majority of these cases that are reported. The majority of these cases that are reported where the vertebral artery was hemorrhaged after somebody doing manual manipulation to the cervical spine. A large number of these were done by people trying to mimic chiropractic care, not by an actual chiropractor. They were done by a massage therapist, physical therapist, and DOs, not by a chiropractor. However we wanna hand this blame to chiropractic profession for the entire thing. So, again, when you really dive into this and really look at it, it looks like another Wilk's lawsuit situation. We're just gonna try to purposely come after chiropractors and blame chiropractors for this. Another important factor to look at this is my malpractice rate. As a chiropractor, we have the lowest malpractice rate of any healthcare provider, the lowest. We pay next to nothing. I pay three zeros to two zeros less than the medical doctor does doing the exact same thing as me. I have gone to seminars with medical doctors that just lose their cool when they hear how low my malpractice rate is compared to theirs. I know a neurosurgeon in Illinois. They pay, add two zeros and add a couple hundred thousand dollars more compared to what I pay. So, insurance rates have figured out that we're pretty safe. Therefore, we must be pretty safe. Chiropractors do not cause these things. Now, how does this keep happening? Why does this keep coming up? Are there chiropractors who do not recognize this patient could have possibly had a stroke and proceeded to give chiropractic care afterwards? Yes, absolutely. Are there chiropractors that don't do a good enough job? Maybe aren't very good chiropractors that miss these things. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, there are bad chiropractors. There's bad everything in every profession. Every one of us have been to a good mechanic and a bad mechanic. There's good lawyers. There's bad lawyers. There's good doctors. There's bad doctors. This is just a fact of life. This is just why you need to look to see where your chiropractor's education is, what your chiropractic reviews are and stuff like that. And find yourself a good quality chiropractor. And that's how we discover these things. Now, our clinics, my grandfather started our practice in 1949. Since then, there's been 10 of us that have become chiropractors in my family. Of those 10 of us, we have opened numerous clinics all over Northern Illinois, also now, Wisconsin. We've seen millions of patients in 1949 to today, in 2022. How many incidents have we had in all of our clinics? All of our efforts put together that caused a stroke, zero, none. So, is this a common thing? Is this something you should worry about every day when you go to the chiropractor? No. Chiropractors are trained to look at and observe to see this is a problem. Here's another interesting side study that was found, again, PubMed index and research had found out that this is to be true that you're actually safer in my office than you are a medical office if you've had the stroke.'Cause if you go to the medical doctor and they notice that something's wrong with you, they do this range of motion and you have a stroke. They discovered the stroke. If you come to my office and do the range of motion, the exact same thing, the literature shows that we are blamed for creating the problem. So, being that we automatically get the blame and not the credit, we are so much more cautious and so much more, I dunno if the word paranoid's correct, but so much more paranoid that we're gonna get blamed for something that we didn't do. We are so much more likely to send you to the emergency room for scans and checks more than a family physician would be.'Cause again, when the family physician does a range of motion test, they have you look both ways and move your head up and down, and the stroke should occur, they found the stroke. When we do the exact same thing in our office, do the exact same range of motion, they go ahead and accuse us of causing the stroke'cause of all those years back Chester Wilk found out going after the AMA. So, as chiropractors, we are more cautious and more scared of being blamed for something we didn't do. So, we are twice as likely to send you out and get the care that you actually need when this happens. Another study that shows why you're safer here, we know you better. We see you more. We talk to you more. We get to know you more. We interact with you more. So, if you were to come into my office and you were losing a tremendous amount of blood to your head, I know you, I talked to you enough, you're a patient, we're established. We have a relationship. I know something's wrong with you that day. I'm not afraid to send you out. Have I sent people off for this? Absolutely. Luckily, they all came back negative. We're here in the side of caution. But yes we do do that. We do check to make sure it's okay. Have I ever done something where I've done afterwards and thought that I caused a stroke and sent somebody to the hospital? We check you out before we take care of you. We make sure you're okay before we start. So, we've never had to send somebody after care. We have sent some people prior to care to make sure that they're okay and thank goodness, they were. So, this is a topic I don't like talking about because it doesn't exist. It's not a real thing. If you read the science and you read the literature, not the pamphlets, not the magazines, not the media. So, look for the science, PubMed index. If you don't know how to research stuff on the internet to find out real healthcare, I've done many videos on that. Check it out, do a search. You'll find it on my topics. Other than that, everybody, I hope I answer this question definitively to the point it got to it. If you have any questions about this, don't hesitate a call and ask. You're gonna meet that person that says I have an uncle(indistinct) from me. He went to the chiropractor one time when that chiropractor gave him a stroke. I'm telling you that the literature doesn't document that and nothing's been ever proven or show that that ever happened. It's just the thing that we get blamed and accused of. And just because an MD says it happened, doesn't mean it happened. They're not that all-knowing,(chuckles) I'll tell you. All right, everybody, have a good day. If you have a question for"Ask the Chiropractor", go ahead and leave it below. Send me a message, email me. Check me out at rockforddc.com, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D, dc.com. And maybe next week, you'll be the question of the week. Other than that, stay healthy, stay strong, and I'm here to help. Thank you.