Chiropractors Under Fire: Addressing Misleading Media Stories

In this episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' Dr. Brant Hulsebus tackles a controversial media story about a 29-year-old who reportedly died after a chiropractic adjustment. Dr. Hulsebus highlights the importance of distinguishing negligent practice from the chiropractic profession and stresses that the incident occurred outside North America where chiropractic regulation may vary. He argues that most chiropractors follow strict guidelines and are highly trained, emphasizing the need for public education on safe chiropractic practices. Dr. Hulsebus also critiques media bias against chiropractors and encourages viewers to seek truthful information from reputable sources.

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Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Hello and welcome to another edition of Ask a Chiropractor. Today, I want to talk about a topic that, as chiropractors, we're fatigued about talking about. The New York Post, January 28th, ran an article, 29 year old dies after going to a chiropractor to treat, crack her neck during a workout. This is a story of somebody who went to a the way it's presented is somebody that went to a chiropractor didn't survive the chiropractic adjustment. But I'd like to break this story down and say this is not a thing about chiropractic. This is a thing about a negligent physician, which happens on all levels of all types all the time. But the way the media always tries to spin it is they try to make it seem like chiropractic is dangerous. Negligent people are dangerous. Most chiropractors out there, I would say almost all of us, try our hardest to follow the rules, use our research, use our science, do our knowledge before we take care of somebody. But what happened was this person went to somebody who delivered horrible chiropractic care to this patient. It would be no different than if I went to a random cardiac surgeon in an alley and said I need a heart transplant and they do it for me and I don't survive. We don't blame We don't blame heart surgeons, we don't blame cardiac surgeons, we blame The dum that was doing the heart surgery in Alley. So let me break this down. First thing that's really important in this story, when you look at it, it didn't happen in North America. It happened in Europe. Now, why is that important? I sit, I'm very active in the International Chiropractic Association and we talk a lot about respirosity, where somebody comes in with a chiropractic degree from a different country. Can they get licensed in America? Can they get licensed in the state of Illinois, where I am? And the answer is not always true. Majority of the time, the answer is no. There's very few international chiropractic colleges. that are recognized here in North America, and I stress North America, I should say U. S. and Canada, and part of the Caribbean. Because we have the first of all, chiropractic was invented in America by a Canadian, Dr. Palmer. So we're very fortunate. Founded in America and Canada. And so we've had the oldest licensures, oldest practices in America, Canada. So chiropractic has its beginning in North America. So when it comes to regulating chiropractic and having the rules and laws, there's nobody that's done chiropractic longer than America and Canada. So we have some of the national boards. We have some of the strict licensure and Our education, our schools are under the same guidance as any other school, medical school, dental school, optometry school, any kind of school. So our education here is far above and beyond what it is in a lot of other places. I know some people have come to me, actually into my office from parts of Asia, where they took a weekend course to become a chiropractor and wanted to talk to me about different moves. I had to send them to Palmer College and told them to sign up. I wasn't going to entertain that. Various parts of the world, chiropractic isn't what it is here. Being that this happened in Europe, that's to me already okay, we gotta look into this because, maybe you can go to a great college like Palmer College, or one of the other schools in North America. And there are other schools outside of North America, don't get me wrong, they're just far and few. Next, it was reported this person already knew that they had an artery hemorrhage in their neck. They'd already gone to a physician and was told that, but wanted to seek alternative ways to get rid of this artery in the neck. It's not that the chiropractor adjustment tore the artery. The artery was already documented to have already been torn. It was already an issue. And when this artery in your neck is torn, one of the number one side effects of the torn artery is severe neck pain. This is why a lot of people end up going to the chiropractor when this artery is torn, because a lot of people go to the chiropractor when they have severe neck pain. This is not earth shattering news. A lot of people go to the dentist when their tooth hurts. But as chiropractors, we're trained to recognize that it could be a vascular injury, more so than a muscular or skeletal injury, so we're trained to identify this and learn this and immediately get them to where they need to be. Now, as a side note, a lot of times when we send them somewhere, we still get blamed, even though we don't do nothing, we just put them in an ambulance and get them to where they need to be, and the media still reports that we did something. Yeah, we solved a problem, we got them where they needed to be, but yet a lot of times in this profession, we still get blamed for doing something, even though all we did was take a history and get them out of our office to where they needed to be, in the emergency room. So this person had already been there. They'd already been in the emergency room. They already had this artery that was torn in their neck. Already diagnosed, already said that, you are, you have a major problem in your neck. This has to be addressed. This person didn't want to do medical treatment and went somewhere else. So they ended up going to a chiropractor. I guess either in their gym or down the street from their gym. I don't know how much that sounds like. Overall, established clinic, more like, when I read the article, it's more like somebody in a gym who did a chiropractic adjustment, or what they claim to be a chiropractic adjustment. Again, I say what they claim to be a chiropractic adjustment because a lot of people got hurt and they tried to do research on chiropractic care before. However, none of the care was given by a chiropractor. It was given by a physical therapist, it was given by a PT, it was given by massage people. None of the research was actually done by a chiropractor, so that research was thrown out too, saying that chiropractic adjustments hurt when none of them were actually given by a trained chiropractor. But in this one right here, there was a CT. It was all done. There's no doubt this was there. The chiropractor failed to obtain a history. The chiropractor failed to obtain any prior medical knowledge of this patient and do their due diligence before treating somebody. Now, again, that's just somebody being negligent. That's not the profession. That's somebody that doesn't know what they're doing. They even said this patient self discharged themselves from the hospital and went down to the chiropractor afterwards. Immediately after having the adjustment, the patient's symptomatology was off the charts, which is another major red flag to get him out and get him somewhere. But I understand that didn't really happen. But again, none of that has to do with their profession. It has to do with somebody being negligent and being a physician and calling themselves a chiropractor. So this is what we typically see. We typically see that there's 45 different factors of someone just being a really bad claiming to be a chiropractor, but doing it really poorly and the media likes to portray it as if we're a dangerous profession, as if you came to the chiropractor, you're putting your life in your own hands. And as a chiropractor, I'm just frankly tired of it. We don't see this every time a medical doctor, like a family physician, gets in trouble for doing something because it happens. You can check through the internet, right? You can see people of all likes of life do bad things. But we don't blame the whole medical profession when somebody, as a medical physician, practices bad. We don't blame the entire dentistry profession when there's a bad dentist. We report on this individual. We, a lot of times, even have their name in the articles saying, Doctor! Blah, blah, blah. Committed the following act. That is usually to say a dentist, dentistry is committing the following acts. But for whatever reason, the media is very biased towards chiropractors. And they just put down another chiropractor victim. Which is ludicrous. This is just a bad, negligent situation. Whether or not they were fully trained as a chiropractor is up in the air. Now if they were in Canada or North America, U. S. Virgin Islands or something like that, and they had a license, I can tell you, then they had to go through all the scrutiny. But over in Europe, I can't say that. I wish I could, but I can't. We're trying to get that established, get that done, but you just can't. I don't think a lot of us would want to go see a medical physician or have surgery in a third world country and most of the world, chiropractic is still that way. Luckily, it's getting better and growing every day, and it's getting better every day, but things like this are massive setbacks. So again, the media tries to portray us as dangerous. Now, here's my logic. If I was dangerous, and the people came to see me, and we've been open for 75 years, over 75 years, and people kept having strokes and dying, why would people still keep coming? Why would we get referrals? Why would more people continue to show up at our office, if we were that dangerous? If we were that dangerous, wouldn't the state or the regulatory boards put a stop to us? When there's other things that are bad, like when you give somebody a medication, and we find out six months into it, the medication's bad, do we let the medications ride out and say, Oh, they're dangerous, stay away from them. No, we pull the medication from the shelves. If chiropractic was so dangerous, why would it still exist? Another question. Malpractice rates. Malpractice rates are based on the volume of claims, things that go wrong. If chiropractic caused so many strokes and so many people to quote unquote pass away Why wouldn't our malpractice rates be outrageous? It would almost be impractical to get malpractice insurance. We just saw all of California burned down and they can't get fire insurance because they know it's too high of a risk of fire so they won't give them insurance. If chiropractors were causing so many injuries and so many things to go wrong with these people with the vertebral artery, causing people to stroke and causing people to die, wouldn't our malpractices be outrageous? Surely it wouldn't be the cheapest of any kind of healthcare provider, which it currently is. Surely our malpractice rates would be astronomical. So sometimes you just have to use common sense and logic. If we were really that dangerous, would we really still be here? So you see articles like this, and people come at me all the time with stuff like this. Look at what I just saw. I get emails, people Facebook messenger, and I like to read them and dissect really what happened. And in this case, there's no doubt that this was just a negligent person. Claiming to have chiropractic education. Maybe they don't. I don't know. A country where, part of the world where chiropractic isn't 100 percent regulated, it makes you iffy. But we know for a fact that this person, the patient, the person who had the injury, already knew they had problems, and already went to a chiropractor with those problems, and it got worse. And you should be able to ask a chiropractor, Hey, is it my okay to have that treatment with this artery done? I've had people come here, in my own practice, with injuries to that artery, and they say, is it okay to have my neck done a certain way? I say, absolutely not. We cannot, absolutely not, we cannot do that. Now we can do a lot of other things, but we can't do certain things. And that's what we know as chiropractors. So when someone says, don't get a chiropractic adjustment because of this little injury right here, we do it in 14 different ways to adjust the first bone in your neck. There's other ways of doing things. There's other ways of working around it. And not only that, but if you have one injured vertebrae, there's a lot of vertebrae. You could probably still work on all the rest of them. So don't let anyone do that. Make sure you go to a respectable, honest chiropractor. You can look them up on the internet today more, better than ever, look at their reviews, look at their standing, look at what they're involved in, associations. Typically, chiropractors that are, , negligent, you're going to see that real quick on their reviews and their things like that. Again, that happens in every field, it happens in, the person that fixes my car, there's good places, there's bad places. The person that, any profession, okay? So don't believe the media when they write stuff like that. I'll go take the article in discuss with your chiropractor should be able to break it down I just broke this one down and explain to you really what happened. So there you have it So if you have questions about chiropractor or chiropractic care, don't believe the media Don't take anybody else's word for what chiropractic can do but go to an honest respectable Chiropractor and ask your question. If you like me to answer your question, leave a comment below Click like subscribe and we'll see you again next week. Thanks ВООДУШЕВЛЯЮЩАЯ МУЗЫКА