Why Chiropractic gets bad press

Ask the Chiropractor- Why Chiropractic gets bad press?  I wanted to break down the history of this and why it still happens. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

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- Hi, Doctor Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is our little podcast that we do where we answer questions that people have about chiropractic or chiropractic care. Because the expert on chiropractic stuff is the chiropractor. So a lot of people might go ask their primary care physician or the pediatrician or somebody about chiropractic care and they don't really know chiropractic so they're not really the best person to ask. They're a great person to ask about medicine and medical help. That's what they studied. Just like your dentist is probably the best person to ask about your teeth, maybe not a podiatrist, right? So if you have a question about chiropractic, ask a chiropractor. And so that's the whole point of this podcast is when somebody has a question they shoot me an email, they do a message or they just come up to me right to my face at the grocery store and say, "Hey, I have a question for you next week." And that has happened. So let's talk about this week, okay? So this week we wanna talk about, you know, something hit home with me again. It's the whole reason we started this podcast is because we wanted you to get the information about chiropractic from a real chiropractor. So I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus. I went to Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa, team Chiropractor for the Rockford Icehogs, and I am the Illinois delegate of the International Chiropractic Association and on the board of the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association. So I know a little bit about chiropractic. So we started this podcast so you could get from a real chiropractor real answers. And what happened? In the national news this week is there's a report that a patient went to a chiropractor. That chiropractor then paralyzed her. And so all this negative press came out about chiropractic, about, you know, the dangers and the cautions of chiropractic care. How you need to be careful, how you need to check with your family doctor before you go. And again, that's why we made this podcast because, simply, they don't know whether you should go or not. They don't understand chiropractic care. Just had a patient come in here today. He's been referred to about 12 different kind of experts like neurologists. They gave him shots, pain pills, they give him shots, they do all this stuff. No one's ever once mentioned chiropractic. And the way he described his case to me sounded like easy chiropractic care. So, somebody got hurt going to a chiropractor. And you know what? It turns out that one in every 10 million people who go to the chiropractor have adverse reaction. That's what the malpractice suits say. That's what the research shows. One in every 10 million people get hurt going to the chiropractor. Sounds to me like it's safer than driving your car down the road. You know, one in every 10 million. There's always gonna be something bad happens. There's always gonna be patient reactions, something bad from time to time, no matter where you go. Whenever you go to the medical doctor, you sign a release form and said, I'm here. I know I'm taking a certain risk, but I'm willing to do it. And how do you know chiropractic's safer than other healthcare providers? Well, one way to look at that, if you think that's the case, is to look at the malpractice rates. Did you know chiropractors had the lowest malpractice rate of any healthcare provider? At the Icehog games we talked about malpractice rates and the other doctors I work with, the orthopedic doctors, the ER physicians, the primary care physicians, even the dentists, they're shocked at how low my rates are. Why are my rates so low? Well, the insurance companies study all the time, like, you know, who's high risk, who's low risk? If you have a 16-year-old driver in your family, you know that they're high risk and you know your car insurance goes way up when they get their driver's license. So why do chiropractors have such such incredibly low malpractice rates? We don't hurt people. People don't get hurt when they come here. Sure, one person might have gotten hurt going to the chiropractor, one in every 10 million, but how many medical malpractice lawsuits were filled the same day? So we have one chiropractic lawsuit for the whole country. How many medical malpractice lawsuits were done that day? How many dental lawsuits were done that day? So could there be an article about somebody who went to the chiropractor and got hurt? Yes. Does it need to make national news every time it happens? Maybe that's why it makes national news because it so rarely ever happens that "You guys won't believe this! Somebody actually got hurt going the chiropractor." And of course that's not the spin they put on it. They put the spin on it that anytime you go with a chiropractor, you're putting your life at risk. So this really annoys me if you can't tell. So I wanted to talk about the history of this. Where did this mistrust and this anti-chiropractic movement start? You see, I'm a chiropractor but my father and my uncles are also chiropractors. And before then, my grandfather also was a chiropractor. My grandfather graduated Palmer College of Chiropractic in 1949. And what he did is he graduated there in Davenport, Iowa and he started driving towards Chicago, found a little town called Byron, Illinois. And that's where he started his practice, the first ever practice in our family. And what happened when he got there was that the medical doctor in town, the only medical doctor in the area, told everybody if you become a patient of the chiropractor, I'll refuse to see you from now on. So if he saw your car at my grandpa's practice, he refused to treat you and take care of you no more. And this is a big deal back in the late forties because, you know, we didn't, you know, the interstates weren't there and the traveling place to place wasn't the same thing. And it was hard to find a family doctor back then. It was only fairly limited. They told my grandmother she couldn't join the PTA. If she joined the PTA, the chiropractor's wife, then the medical doctor would get so mad. So she wasn't allowed to join the PTA or get involved in stuff like with her sons, my dad and uncles. So the distrust isn't the first thing my grandpa discovered back in the late forties, early fifties. And what happened was nobody ever really knew why the doctors were so against chiropractic until a chiropractor named Chester Wilk. Now Chester Wile, again, I'm in Illinois. Chester Wilk is also from Illinois. He's up by the Chicago, a little further away than I am from Chicago. But he discovered that medical doctors would get an actual packet in the mail if a chiropractor showed up in their town. So we have to assume that when grandpa moved to Byron, the medical doctor got a packet from the AMA telling him what to do if the chiropractor comes to your town. How to make sure nobody ever goes to that chiropractor. And they were doing this all over the country trying to stop our profession from growing and doing what we do. So they started a massive campaign of hate and distrust and misinformation about chiropractic. Totally. So a lot of the things you hear about chiropractic being dangerous and being risky and, "I wouldn't go there, I know these things happened." These things all stem from those decades of lying about chiropractic like the AMA did. Because you see this lawsuit went on for a long time and it wasn't until the eighties that Dr. Chester Wilk found he won his anti-trust lawsuit against the AMA. You can look it up. It's Wilk, W-I-L-K, versus the AMA. There's tons of information on the internet about it and about how Dr. Chester Wilk was able to sue the AMA for their inflammatory remarks and anti-trust against the chiropractic profession. And he won his case. And it's quite alarming if you actually go back and look at it because the AMA just viewed chiropractor as, we can do whatever we want. We don't have to answer to chiropractors. So if you want to bash them, we can bash them. And it was a really, really bad lawsuit and as far as the way the AMA treated everybody, well luckily that's what Chester Wilk won. So he won. And now they don't do that anymore. They can't say bad things about us. But you'll still see stuff, like, I know a couple years ago the American Heart Association posted some study that some backwards research they did talking about how chiropractors can cause stroke and there was a doctor that actually looked at this. Cassidy is his name, C-A-S-S-I-D-Y, Cassidy. And Cassidy reviewed how they did their research and it was backwards, right? It was like, we want to draw those conclusions so what kind of information can we get to draw this conclusion that chiropractors do this? When Cassidy actually looked at all the data, it was actually, you know, it was actually in reality safer to go to the chiropractor than it was the primary care physician if you had this hemorrhage in your neck going on at that time. It was real interesting stuff. But Cassidy's study was PubMed index meaning that, to get PubMed, P-U-B-M-E-D, to get PubMed research indexed, you had to go through tons of scrutiny to make sure there's no flaws in your research or that it wasn't done with malintents or just bad data or you're able to replicate the same reaction over and over again. And so Cassidy studies research and index. The American Heart Association's article did not meet that criteria. So if you really want to look at the actual stuff that the American Heart Association was talking about and you wanna see the real science, go to PubMed, look up Cassidy, and look at the research he did immediately following that. Matter of fact, when this thing happened last week with this chiropractic patient getting injured, they immediately quoted the American Heart Association which, then I knew this was garbage, because I know the American Heart Association's research is garbage. After you read the PubMed index article by Cassidy, I mean Cassidy discretioned it, it should help flaw their research and their data and their reporting of the data was wrong. So why does this still happen? Why does the American Heart Association still do this? Well, I mean, think about it. You do decades and decades and decades of lying and slander against somebody. After you do it long enough, you know, people start to think it's actually real. It's actually true. And trying to disprove things that have been talked about and put into culture for so many years, it just, it makes people believe it's true. And that's just kind of how society works. So after all the decades and decades of saying bad things about chiropractors and trying to disprove chiropractors and trying to keep people from going to the chiropractor which the AMA documentally did, it's just sad that today that so many people still believe it to be true. So if I went to school in the medical school in the eighties and I was taught that, you know, chiropractors are bad from teachers I trust and from an association, the American Heart and American Medical Association, the AMA, the association I believed to tell me the truth and be honest with me, then what else I supposed to do other than think it's real? So those doctors out there that say that stuff, I just, I hope they take time to go look at the actual PubMed articles and the real science behind it and get to learn the truth. Now today, the coolest thing about chiropractors for us as far as changing, making a better path for the future, is sports. Working with the sports teams. Because when I'm in the locker room taking care of an athlete and the orthopedic doctor or the family physician's right next to me, they're seeing what I'm doing. They're seeing how I'm measuring the player and taking care of them. And a lot of times, they don't know I know this, I see them go around the corner with the player and say, "Now after he did that, how do you feel?" And I don't care because I know the answer. The answer is usually always positive. So I love the fact that they do that. Even here in my practice, I had a good friend of mine who's a physician. He told me he wanted to refer to chiropractor for care, but he didn't know what we did. So this physician took it upon himself to come with the patient, sit in a corner with me in the room and watched me take care of the patient to learn what I do. And that's the future, right? That's the future of us working together hand in hand. There's no reason why chiropractors should do what they do. Dentists should do what they do. Medical doctor should do what they do. And it should all be for you, the patient. We should all get together, communicate, work together. I tell people, don't go to a medical doctor that tells you not to go to a chiropractor. But in the same time, I tell you don't go to a chiropractor who tells you not to go to a medical doctor. There's reasons they both exist. They both have a good purpose and we don't do the same thing. So there's no reason why we should be in conflict with each other. So why does chiropractic get a bad rap? Why do people say bad things about chiropractic? Well, decades and decades and decades of lies about what we do and who we are. Proof? Look up PubMed, look up Cassidy's research in the studies. Amazing stuff, real science. Second proof? Look at my malpractice rates. I have the absolute lowest malpractice rates of anybody I know. And I'm talking about like two less zeros on what I pay per year compared to what my other friends pay. So they're paying six figures, I'm paying four figures for the same coverage. I know it's Illinois, so the prices are exaggerated because we have horrible malpractice laws in Illinois. But just goes to show you that, if I'm that dangerous, my rate should be that much higher and they're just not. I'm happy to show you the receipts if any medical doctor out there doesn't believe me I can show you the receipts from me paying it. So there you go. Why the bad rep? Years of misinformation. And then, like I said, if you don't believe me, Cassidy, study on PubMed. Look up my malpractice rates to see how safe and dangerous we really are. And again, all your physicians should want to work together. We're all here for you. If the physician says anything but not working with this doctor, this doctor, it's just bad taste. So I hope I answered your question about why is there so much negativity about chiropractic care from other people. I hope that makes sense. I try to break it down logically, scientifically, and explain it all to you. Look up the Chester Wilk versus the AMA. It's amazing stuff. Other than that, you know, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care feel free to leave a comment below. Go to my website, Rockford DC, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com. Chat to us there. Connect with us there. Go to our Facebook and social media. Wherever it is, find us. Leave us a question. Maybe next time you'll be the question of the week. All right everybody, thanks for listening. Stay healthy, stay strong, and have a great, great day. Thank you.