The Dark Side of Chiropractic

One should be warned of a human factor in the chiropractic industry. The profession lends itself to abuse. Should a chiropractor be dishonest (imagine that), tempted to drum-up more business or just angry at his patient, he can easily turn instruments of healing into those of injury. His hands top the list.

According to the history of chiropractic, it seems to have originated from a spiritual charism. Some people throughout history have been gifted with healing knacks. On the coattails of these gifted ones ride today's quacks.

These people were called "bone-setters." They had a magic touch for healing pain in the joints, particularly those of the back. The vertebral joints, their disks and dynamics are the domain of bone-setters. Fixing what ails people there comes as naturally to them as leading armies does to a virago.

Bone-setters applied strategic thrusts, aligning the spinal column, setting bones aright. What they did cannot be explained by modern technology, as bone-setters practiced their craft many centuries B.C. People would come to them from miles around like tribal people came to their holy men.

Given the sacred origin of this healing craft, today's schools of chiropractic cannot be compared with it. From my studies about the phenomenon, one does not become a bone-setter. One is rather born a bone-setter. Like the Lakota holy man who has visions about the future, you can't set up a technical school that teaches people how to do that.

In chiropractic today, there is a curious instrument called an activator. It is a spring-loaded hammer that looks like a miniature pogo stick. This hand-held device is used most commonly to strike the transverse and spinous processes of the vertebrae. Proponents of its use claim that this little hammer helps adjust spinal misalignments, also known as "vertebral subluxations" -- the diagnosis of which is not clearly discernable outside of risky radiation imagery (x-rays) which is pushed at chiropractic offices beyond necessity.

Chiropractors claim that subluxations can also be detected by observing the length of a patient's legs, when they are measured side-by-side. I do not accept this as a science. For injuries, magnetic resonance imagery is a substantial method of diagnosis to be considered. If a gentle, hands-only spinal adjustment does not do the trick, then what ails you is something beyond the scope of the chiropractor anyway. Get thee to an MRI lab if you want to know the brass-tacks.

If there is no pain present, it is a good indicator that things are fine. When it comes to bones, leaving what is not broken, unbroken is better for the spine. These eager-beaver doctors should be told that if nothing hurts, then Dude -- don't fix it.

As things read to me, medical questionnaires are not so much about diagnosis as they are about fishing. The doctor is fishing for ways to make you feel sick and worried. Every medical student knows that studying diseases can manifest in physical symptoms. As does the hypnotist who's bread and butter is the power of suggestion.

Did your mother die of kidney failure? Then that is perhaps how you will die (hint-hint). Are you sometimes depressed or divorced? Well naturally you're a crack-pot in need of psychotropic medication. What else is wrong with you? Let's cast the jitter-bug a little farther this time. Do you have night sweats? Based on your age, the sky is falling. We have some pills for that. How's your sex-life? Not so good? We need to get you on some hormones right away or else you'll surely lose your mind.

You get the idea. So at the chiro's, expect a similar questionnaire about all the things that are supposed to be wrong with you. And how the bones in your back are all related to it -- somehow. If the white-coat industry pushed Amish veggies and vigorous exercise as hard as they pushed pills, their industry would dwindle to tying off bleeders and end-of-life morphine.

The activator can be used to align a subluxated vertebra by striking one of the handy bone levers (transverse or spinous process) and thusly snap it back into its proper place again. Likewise, the activator can also be used to knock a perfectly-good bone askew using the same method. If this is the case, you will feel it. It will hurt. Keep in mind that not only is a spinal adjustment not supposed to hurt -- but if done correctly, it should feel good, like your little sister walking on your back after band practice.

According to the bone-setters, your body has a wisdom of its own and gets its walking orders from a higher place. Injury and disease are made known to you in obvious ways. If all you do with your body is ride a daily couch, then these ways will be less obvious.

The spine has a propensity to right itself by simple traction. Hang upside-down from the monkey bars for a while and listen for the popping sounds. Doesn't that feel good? That is your spine aligning itself.

Ideally, the activator spring tension is supposed to be loaded to an amplitude commensurate with the bone size and density that it is intended to adjust. Should the hammer strike a small bone with high-enough amplitude, a fracture can result. If the activator is used to secretly injure a patient, he may think that he injured himself and seek help for the new pain from the same person who caused it.

Chiropractic is not recognised by most insurance companies and thereby shares a predictable decline with other alternative therapies in today's economy. This sets the stage for fraud, abuse and deliberate injury of patients who would otherwise only visit their chiropractors when they have hoisted a heavy cat, or something.

In the case of angry chiropractors, one should be aware that "neck adjustments" can be used to tear every muscle in your neck. All a skilled injurer needs is four seconds to make it happen. But your body will require two weeks to make it heal. The damage inflicted will remind you each time you turn your head, however slightly, that you should not have asked for that itemized list of costs and services.

Some chiropractors may be angered by having to produce a document of charges and services for their patient's records. Such documents hold the chiropractor to what has been put in writing and are safeguards against fast-talking duplicity.

One doctor recently told a patient that based on x-rays he found a subluxation that he then treated with what felt like a blow from a carpenter's hammer. Yet when the patient called him to task, he could not point out which bone it was on the x-rays -- which showed no sign of subluxation. The blow to the patient's vertebra was inflicted during a prone position without warning. The patient complained of fracture-class pain that took several months to subside.

Lessons learned: always demand everything in writing up front. Nothing a chiropractor does should require you to remove clothing. Never submit to unnecessary x-rays. Never let a chiropractor use an activator hammer on your body unless you are willing to risk broken or dislocated bones. Ask the chiropractor exactly what his adjustment process entails before you let him touch you. http://shpearson.wordpress.com

** Sources
(1) Scott Haldeman, Principles and Practice of Chiropractic (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005)
(2) The Empirical, 2009

Camps, Pens and Kent State

Showtime's sleazy allegory smacks of the same dagger that hangs over Americans from state and federal prison web sites. They are linked to fabricated "psy-op" sites that brandish similar swords of Damocles, reeking of CIA's cuddly bed-buddy, the ADL. It is my belief that CIA and ADL are close nestlers due to studies of their texts and familiarity with their writing styles, formats, general modus operandi in the field, et cetera. We have had a few years to watch and study them. They are not the only kids on campus.

The Anti-Defamation League (they live to defame, by the way) is a non-government affiliated friend on whom the government can depend -- to spread dis-info, propaganda, fear-juice and bogus drivel from which the government wants to distance itself. Not only for the obvious reasons, but also for legal fine print.

Back to the daggers. Some web sites exhibit humiliating photographs of inmates taking showers and being marched around on their daily routines. In the one below, the writer pokes fun at prisoners and issues thinly-veiled threats to anyone visiting the web site. He implies that they too can find themselves in this predicament.

On prison sites I have read what I deem postings of bad taste. Lurid details and witness testimonies of execution attendees who watched a man die in the electric chair. The list was long of those who watched this horrific thing. They went into great detail in their wordy accounts describing every drop of fluid that oozed from the man's body. Way too much information. They give us these details but CNN won't report the honest news?

This is a fear tactic targeting anyone who is curious about those federal prison camps springing up all over the place. FEMA Camps they call them. They are large capacity concentration camps. Their locations are no longer a secret. Sites like this drive the spike in deeper of what our government has been covertly working on for decades.

Here, in colors and contrasts designed to strain your eyes, you can read your fill of menacing, psychiatric rhetoric designed to make you afraid of your government. It is pickled in the venom of contempt. Like the man who sends a two-year old filly to the slaughter house for losing a high-stakes race. Same venom. It has a distinct flavour: http://www.federalprisoncamptour.com/index/html

You will note how this fabricated site links to official federal and state prison sites (no doubt with collusion and support). The government appears to be worried about what to do with millions of angry citizens who grow more angry by the day as they learn what their government has been up to for not just 60 years, but for over a century. Truly the manifest-
ation of Howard Rheingold's biggest nightmare:
smart mobs.

Unlike the crude, illiterate mob that was harnessed to bring about the Bolshevik Revolution, you people are capable of independent thought. Despite what your "shadow government" may write and say about you, they know that you are not at the mercy of their translations, public speeches and propaganda. You can choose where you get your news.

That is why they are presently racing to enact legislation to muzzle Internet broadcasts, censor and ban blogs like this one and block other sorts of media that publish news you can't get from CNN. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGw3_U91utU

This has them worried. You are a powder-keg of might and voting power. As we are taught by the war colleges, deception, intimidation and martial law have their uses. A fitting example is what the National Guard did at Kent State University in 1970. Boy, did that ever back-fire, huh Mr. War College.

A bunch of trigger-happy weekend warriors sprayed rapid fire into a crowd of unarmed college students -- oops. They killed a few of them and kicked off the fire-storm of protest that would cripple the Vietnam war machine. Slam-dunk. Protests whose anthems were sung by Jim Morrison, John Lennon and a chorus of other voices who threatened the government from a rock & roll stage.

The Vietnam War hype received a killing blow in Ohio that day. People were wising up to the fact that Vietnam -- was a sham. Just like what's happening right now in Afghanistan. Costing us much in blood and treasure, these wars are making war contractors rich and corpses of our sons. They are making billions on the blood of armies and their victims.

History does indeed repeat. Given that, and knowing the outcome of large public outcry, the party-hat war machine is getting nervous. Their gravy train might soon come to a screeching halt. And that's not what they want. They want war in the Middle East for years. And years and years and years. It serves so many of their aims.

Kill-off Muslims, the hated neighbors of Israel. Reduce American population. Finish-off our economy and national sovereignty. Enslave us to international tyranny. Enlarge our monstrous government and line the pockets of international bankers in the process just like every war since Waterloo.

So yeah, they have motive to make cowards of you. Jim Morrison spoke his mind on stage, digressing copiously between songs. He tangled racks with police everywhere he went, I believe, not because he was drunk and obnoxious. But because he opposed the Vietnam war and was an embarrassment to his flag officer father. He was found conveniently dead in his Paris bath tub at the ripe old age of 27.

Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin followed suit. Heroin we are told. Nobody got too old. Not even Ronnie VanZant or John Lennon. Any charismatic, anti-government voice that drew big crowds. Think about it. Can you sway public opinion?

Many seminal voices have been silenced over the years. They kill journalists like crazy world-wide. Dangerous business, writing the news if you are not allergic to truth. John F. Kennedy was a potentate. Don't forget Italy's Aldo Moro. Do you see the pattern?

I think the next presidential election will be interesting.
http://shpearson.wordpress.com/

Consider the Source

Thinly-veiled allegory, no? http://shpearson.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/henrys-dagger/

Hot Smoke

I watched a mental hygiene movie aimed at Marines. In Cover Me, it looked like a chaplain working his way down the ranks as he took both hands of each Marine in his, saying, "you're gonna make it." With ceremoniously crossed arms, he gripped their hands firmly, offering words of encouragement. It was apparent that his moves were well-rehearsed. Looking them in the eye, giving it all he had by way of religious witchcraft, he cast his spell of faith, hope and apple pie. The chaplain did his best to put the military hocus-pocus on gullible youth. Those poor boys swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Then marched off to war.

Vietnam all over again, yes? You should read the freak postings of that faceless, nick-named nurse on one of the medical forums. He/she goes on about the field medicine practice opportunities in the blood-bath of Afghanistan. Oh how sweet it is to get the chance to saw somebody's leg off, right? Their stuff reads like a scene from Fangoria. Screw the Hippocratic Oath, let's just compare horror stories. The giddy, o'-so-delightful listings of goodies from the war zone include tales of battle wounds, exotic infections and other "fascinating accounts" of blood and guts.

I don't think these people are Angels in Green. They won't list their real names. I file them in the genre of the emergency medical technician who couldn't wait for his next ambulance ride so he could take Polaroids of the dead people from high-speed car crashes. Then trade them like baseball cards with his paramedic pals later in the snack room.

This long war, like Vietnam, is attracting vultures, ghouls, morgue freaks, opportunists and "dee-fence" contractors who are making a killing off of killing. In the mean time, Stateside, you have suicidal recruiters who are tired of telling lies and blowing hot smoke at high school boys.

There are legions of "professions" skimming more than their share off the war machine. The medical mania looks like a swarm of cat-eyed reef sharks tearing into fresh meat. They can't get there fast enough to rip off their piece of the action -- so they can brag about it. I just wanna slap them down. They shall never stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Navy corpsmen I have known. Never.

I have felt the jagged fingers of Lewis Puller, Jr., as he shook my hand from a wheelchair. He was an advising lawyer on the General's Staff back then. When he wheeled out from behind his desk, I was shocked. He was missing both legs from the hip. The Marines in his Platoon told me that Puller stepped on a booby-trapped Howitzer shell. It was from these Marines that I learned the value of a corpsman. And the value of a man who is thrust into war on a half-asst whim. Sent back a fragment. And is expected to get on with his life. Puller gave it a shot. Gave it all he had. Then he shot himself. (photo from the handsome Webmaster @, http://1stmarines.org/)

It is heartbreaking to see how many psychologists, behavioural scientists, grief counselors and psychiatrists are cashing-in on analyzing the suffering of America's fighting man. They matter-of-factly lecture their crafts and regurgitate what they have been taught in their fancy schools about aggression and fear hormones. They have teased apart the brains of lab rats with tantamount clinical detachment to be sure.

Taking the cake is one Ph.D. of Psychology and Research. Luxuriating in her pearlescent eye-shadow, she calmly describes the horror of combat for today's sacrificial lambs who are taught to think of themselves as wolves. What qualifies her to talk about such things? The Red Badge of Courage? As she smiles, basking in the focus of her videographer, they cut to scenes of a wounded Marine writhing on a helicopter litter as he is being med-evac'ed. With another lipstick smile she says, "You can't control what your body does during a traumatic or stressful event." Duh. No kidding. And what of those might she have known?

Then another brilliant comment from yet another cosmetically-assisted Dr. of Psychology, "It's okay if you're not okay." The Sgt. Major of the Marine Corps had this to say, "Get them help -- so we can get them back in the fight."

They wrap up this pep-talk with a corny song (Calling All Angels) and a quote from Rudyard Kipling, "The strength of the wolf is in the pack. And the strength of the pack is in the wolf." After watching the "film" you can send your comments to Director/Producer Norman Lloyd.

Clearly they are worried about another case of "maxed-out and pist-off." Traumatic stress is hard on the body and the spirit who is jailed for a term within. Pop some corn and gather 'round for this sure-fire Oscar pick. http://www.semperfifund.org/resources.html