Scrutable

A man broke his neck during a chiropractic treatment and died.

What's most terrifying is that the chiropractor clearly had no idea how to respond to adverse events:

"She started on the shoulders and went round his body.... Then the table dropped and he shouted 'You're hurting me. You are hurting me. I can't feel my arms,'" Mrs Lawler told the inquest.

She said Dr Scholten carried on treating her husband for a moment but then realised he was unresponsive and asked him to turn over.

He did not respond and the chiropractor manoeuvred him into a chair.

Someone who's been having treatment on their back who says they suddenly can't feel their arms and falls unconscious is manhandled into a chair?! Surely everyone knows you don't move people who may have damaged their spine unless absolutely necessary. And you definitely don't put an unconscious person in a chair.

It gets better:

She said when paramedics arrived Dr Scholten did not inform them of the table drop element during the treatment only that she had been applying "gentle manipulation".

The more I learn about chiropractic the more scared I get. The risks are so great, the benefits so small, and the chiropractic doctors appear to be so poorly trained that they panic when things go wrong.

There was a thread about this case in another forum I used to visit.

Special offer: £20 off your first consultation at chiropractic1st.co.uk

Huh, normally it's aneurysms caused by scratching the arteries in the neck that kills 'em. Actually taking them down in the office is a step up in the game.

ETA: These people really shouldn't be allowed to call themselves doctors.

"No criminal charges"

But will the "professional" body take any action against this person?

Is there a chiropractic death count somewhere?

It looks like Edzard Ernst did a review back in 2010 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20642715

This, but only up to 2008 and no idea how complete.

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 12, 2019 10:50 am

Is there a chiropractic death count somewhere?

I'm not aware of one. There's a paper by Edzard Ernst from 2010 that tried to quantify the deaths but there doesn't appear to be any requirement to report adverse outcomes, unlike in conventional medicine. Interestingly, that seems to extend to the doctors who end up treating those adverse outcomes. A survey of British neurologists found 10% of those surveyed had treated at least one patient with injuries that occurred within 24 hours of spinal manipulation and none of those cases had been previously reported in the literature. It's therefore likely that the incidence of morbidity and mortality from chiropractic manipulation are higher than the published evidence indicates. It's actually got me thinking that maybe one way to counter chiropractic is to push for them to have to report adverse outcomes.

Apparently, the "General Chiropractic Council" has not even imposed an interim suspension of this Chiropractor...

https://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/155959 ... or-clinic/

The Good Thinking Society has got The Telegraph to write a good piece on the Lawler case and chiropractic in general.

Fishnut wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 12, 2019 8:29 pm

The Good Thinking Society has got The Telegraph to write a good piece on the Lawler case and chiropractic in general.

The article was reasonable, I enjoyed it. Some of the comments were but mostly balanced by sane ones.

And now apparently the General Chiropractic Council has described the death as "entirely unforeseeable consequence of the treatment"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -neck.html