Paralyzed woman sues chiropractic for half billion II

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I really don't know what you mean by vertebral misalignment. Please define your term.

Good. Thanks. That's not how subluxation-based or "straight" chiropractors view it. Their definition is pretty smokey and sketchy but it basically comes down to an imagined articulation that somehow manages to impede the flow of an imagined neural energy that somehow effects health. To get a sense of the strangeness of it, here's how a chiropractic position paper signed by lots of chiropractic colleges in North America put it:

quote:

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A subluxation is a complex of functional and/or structural and/or pathological articular changes that compromise neural integrity and may influence organ system function and general health.

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Any neurologist or anatomist will tell you that's a complex crock of nonsense. It's basically a complicated way of saying "we think vertebrae pinch spinal nerves that deliver healing energy to the body". So, classic D.D. Palmer stuff.

The definition use to include mention of the subluxation being detectable in x-rays until it was shown that chiropractors really couldn't consistently do that, so the definition changed.

Some definitions are so obtuse and long it's impossible to make even a grain of anatomical sense out of them. If they were diagrams they'd look a circuitous as Billy going from his house to the drug store in a Family Circus cartoon.

On the other hand, some old school chiropractors just use this diagram to demonstrate a "pinched nerve" in a way that bears no resemblance to the actual relation or relative size of the nerve and the space for it to emerge from the spine. Nerves actually don't get pinched and vertebrae don't go "out" like that. You can have a collapsed disc or a crushed vertebra, but, in either case, you don't really want anyone cranking your back.

[img]http://www.docandylesko.com/images/sublux.gif[/img]

None of which are the thing you described.

[ 17 June 2008: Message edited by: Wayne MacPhail ]

Triciamarie, do either of those conditions impinge on a flow of healing energy to the body? You are being obtuse. I think you know perfectly well the difference we are discussing here.

Spondylolisthesis, for example is detectable by x-ray (as is required by Veteran's Affairs).

Chiropractors treat thousands of Canadians daily for vertebral subluxation. Spondylolisthesis could hardly be the diagnosis in daily cases. You know that.

[ 17 June 2008: Message edited by: Wayne MacPhail ]