Scientology , chiropractor connection

MingulayJohnny

Hello , I had a session with a chiropractor recently and it was my first session. While I was waiting for him to process x-rays I noticed charts on the wall. One of the charts was a 'tone scale' with cartoon characters ranging from dark and depressed looking to vibrant and healthy. There was also a psychology chart with L Ron Hubbard's name on it. I'm very wary of Scientology and I checked the charts out online when I got home. Turns out that the Scientology group allegedly targets Chiropractors. I canceled future appointments in case he started hassling me to join up or ask me to do a stress test or something. Has anybody else ever seen these charts on a chiropractor's or alternative therapists wall?.

chin_grin

Funny you should mention this but a certain Chiropractor <I'm not going to mention the area> is giving "stress tests" preceding any/all physical work on the body! I find this extremely weird to be honest.

Pompey Magnus

You were surprised to see a nonsense peddler peddling nonsense?

chin_grin

Pompey Magnus wrote: »

You were surprised to see a nonsense peddler peddling nonsense?

Kind of hit a nerve when while dressed as a woodchuck he chucked some wood very far. Not sure how far though.

fontanalis

Don't go to woo merchants in future.
http://scienceblogs.com/whitecoatunderground/2008/01/why_chiropractic_is_patently_r.php

yeppydeppy

Send me €500 now and I'll fix all your ills with homeopathy and read your stars!

Captain Darling

chin_grin wrote: »

Kind of hit a nerve when while dressed as a woodchuck he chucked some wood very far. Not sure how far though.

I hate to admit i'm not a pheasant plucker, but a pheasant pluckers son.

chin_grin

yeppydeppy wrote: »

Send me €500 now and I'll fix all your ills with homeopathy and read your stars!

PM sent!

dirtyghettokid

YES! i knew a chiropractor in a certain area of dublin that got a bit friendly with a guy i used to know and then tried to get him into scientology. weird!

Lumen

I can understand why chiropractic is increasingly popular in Ireland. It involves the kind of hands-on spiritual healing that is no longer available from the Catholic church.

sink

Chiropractic medicine is an alternate medicine, i.e medicine that either has not been proved to work or proved not to work.

Chiropractics is at the same level as Dianetics (the pshycobabble behind Scientology), it is therefor totally unsurprising to find a practitioner of one also practices the other.

I suggest you go see a qualified Medical doctor such as an orthopedic surgeon.

ScumLord

Lumen wrote: »

I can understand why chiropractic is increasingly popular in Ireland. It involves the kind of hands-on spiritual healing that is no longer available from the Catholic church.

Are you confusing healing with rape?

Dave!

Where did all these skeptics come from?! Randomers using the term 'woo' etc! :eek: I love it!

fontanalis

Dave! wrote: »

Where did all these skeptics come from?! Randomers using the term 'woo' etc! :eek: I love it!

Wonderful term, isn't it? Sometimes I double up and go with woo woo.

El Weirdo

I know of a chiropractor who is, or at least used to be into scientology.

Hardly surprising tbh.

Deus Ex Machina

MingulayJohnny wrote: »

Hello , I had a session with a chiropractor recently and it was my first session. While I was waiting for him to process x-rays I noticed charts on the wall. One of the charts was a 'tone scale' with cartoon characters ranging from dark and depressed looking to vibrant and healthy. There was also a psychology chart with L Ron Hubbard's name on it. I'm very wary of Scientology and I checked the charts out online when I got home. Turns out that the Scientology group allegedly targets Chiropractors. I canceled future appointments in case he started hassling me to join up or ask me to do a stress test or something. Has anybody else ever seen these charts on a chiropractor's or alternative therapists wall?.

He sounds like a quack to me, everyone knows you need to sort out your vertebral subluxations, then and only then can you tackle the thetans ffs.

AnonoBoy

I knew an Egyptian back specialist once but he insisted on being called a Cairopractor.





















Sorry.

Orando Broom

fontanalis wrote: »

Wonderful term, isn't it? Sometimes I double up and go with woo woo.

Careful Dr. Bollocko may misconstrue this word. I go with Juju man myself.

Orando Broom

AnonoBoy wrote: »

I knew an Egyptian back specialist once but he insisted on being called a Cairopractor.























Sorry.

Pharaoh nuff.

Coriolanus

Chiropractors rank somewhere alongside aromatherapists tbh.

Orando Broom

Toothiologists.

Ghost Buster

Whats every ones issue with chiropractors? I went to one last week and he sorted my in -growing toe nail nicely.

spirityboy

MingulayJohnny wrote: »

Has anybody else ever seen these charts on a chiropractor's or alternative therapists wall?.

yep it was in Dublin. was at the gym years ago and there was a one there and as i was having back problems i went and spoke to him and arranged an appointment. Turned up at his office and paid no attention to the posters at first, after appointment 3 or 4 i noticed hubbards name and cancelled any other appointements and when they phoned i told them where to go.

pickarooney

What's the difference between a chiropractor and an osteopath? I googled them but was too lazy to read entire pages of possibly incorrect information so I'd prefer a few lines of more than likely erroneous answers.

Coriolanus

Osteopaths, in the us at least are something analogous to an md. Chiropractors recieve their certification after a weekend course at a hotel conference.

AnonoBoy

What's the ratio of happy endings to chiropractor visits?

Is it close to the level you'd get visiting a masseuse?


This is eh.... for research?

seamus

pickarooney wrote: »

What's the difference between a chiropractor and an osteopath? I googled them but was too lazy to read entire pages of possibly incorrect information so I'd prefer a few lines of more than likely erroneous answers.

Osteopathy is a newish but fairly well respected musculoskeletal treatment discipline which enjoys protected status in the UK. The underlying principle is that treating and taking care of the musculoskelatal system will have an overall benefit on the person's physical and mental well-being. Which I think is a fairly obvious conclusion.

Chiropractic "medicine" on the other hand was founded on the principle that problems with your back are the source of all illness and disease in the body. In other words, "I am the only person who can completely cure you". Another form of voodoo, for all intents and purposes. Anyone can call themselves a chiropractor, it is not a protected term in the UK.

The line is a little blurred these days because most people calling themselves chiropractors have realised the patent nonsense that the discipline was founded upon, so consider it a "therapy". But they still work off the general basis that manipulating someone's spine can fight off colds or ease their cancer suffering.

Nolanger

MingulayJohnny wrote: »

Hello , I had a session with a chiropractor recently and it was my first session.

Is this in Herbert Street?

MingulayJohnny

How may of the people who are skeptical of Chiropractors have actually had any adjustments?. Or tried homeopathy for themselves? , I've challenged two friends to try homeopathy ( my shout ) and they wouldn't do it. Even though there is no possibility of adverse effects. The same people would trust an allopathic doctor with whatever pills he prescribed and take them for years without researching them online or keeping abreast or better treatments whether they be allopathic or 'Alternative'. I've got a big gripe with drugs that are supposed to treat illnesses actually worsening somebody's health because of side effects. I'm not completely anti allopathic medicine but I'd rather maintain my health now with diet and alternative treatments than be reliant on statins and whatever else when I get to my fifties.

I've used homeopathy on a cat with asthma who was on deaths door and it brought her back from the brink. I don't think a cat can register the placebo effect. Maybe I'm wrong.

If you consider yourself a scientific person then you should try it out as an experiment. Go to a registered homeopath , the worse that can happen is nothing!!. But then again most professional skeptics I've ever met are as tight as a frogs a**e and it's more the thought of handing over money that aggravates them :rolleyes:. "Why are you giving money to that quack for? it's just distilled water" , "he's just crunching your bones" etc , etc .I can understand why people would be angry at people making big claims to cure cancer with potions and whatever else. I would suggest that if you are skeptical that you go to a reputable therapist and try whatever your skeptical about out. Experiment. There are dodgy alternative health practitioners out there the same as there are dodgy mechanics and plumbers. News reports often use homeopathy as an umbrella term when something goes wrong when it's usually dodgy herbalists who are acting in ignorance. I remember a story from about 3-4 yrs ago where a person was being treated for cancer by some quack and the news report stated that the treatment was coming from a homeopath when they weren't a homeopath at all.

The chiropractor seemed pretty competent and the information I got from the x-ray has helped me out. The adjustments that he did cleared up some persistent lower back pain. Having looked into it more I'm going to go for rolfing instead as I think it's more subtle and effective than 'hard' adjustments.

In relation to homeopathy the link below is to an article about the challenge put up by the arch debunker James Randi to George Vithoulkas . Make what you will of it. I know it works for me and has improved my health far too much to be a placebo effect.

seamus

MingulayJohnny wrote: »

Even though there is no possibility of adverse effects.

By that logic then, there is no possibility of any effects whatsoever and therefore there's no point in trying it out since it does nothing. A treatment cannot be said to either cure you or do nothing. If it can cure you, then it can also potentially damage you. That's the complexity of biochemistry for you.

I've used homeopathy on a cat with asthma who was on deaths door and it brought her back from the brink. I don't think a cat can register the placebo effect. Maybe I'm wrong.

"Regression to the mean" is the effect you're looking for here. It's what makes people think that homeopathy in particular actually works.

You also have to consider confirmation biase. How many other occassions do you recall you, your cat or another relative taking a homeopathic treatment and seeing no difference whatsoever - or no discernable difference than having done nothing?

If you consider yourself a scientific person then you should try it out as an experiment.

Any person who considers themself "scientific" would conduct a proper experiment rather than some uncontrolled scenario where they buy water off some shyster in a funny-smelling shop. But thankfully others have done that for us, and not only has homeopathy been proven to be snake oil, but there are actual mathematics proving that homeopathic "medicine" is nothing but water.

I'm wary about chiropractic because its fundamental belief (that illness and disease can be traced back to problems with the spine) is based upon a juvenile and plain incorrect understanding of human biochemistry dating from the 19th century.

If chiropractic services had merit, they would stand up to scientific scrutiny and be able to point to a large body of evidence proving that what they do is beneficial to the body and would therefore be able to obtain a protected and registered status.

sensibleken

You think theyre bad. I was at an organic fair a few months ago (yes it was ****) where they were selling lamps that claimed because our brains operate at a different frequency than computer screens and teles our bodys absorb lots of extra....stuff. And the only way to get rid of this stuff was to buy their lamps.

It was one of the only times i laughed in someones face

ScumLord

Are Chiropractors the ones that have that big torture bench that they do adjustments on?

I've been to one of them with a bad back and the results were beneficial I'd say from my lay man's opinion. It wasn't an instant cure but it did improve things.

My mother is big into all these alternative medicines and is in fact a qualified aromatherapist. It's all mostly nonsense bar maybe the use of tea tree oil as a mild antiseptic.

MingulayJohnny

Nolanger wrote: »

Is this in Herbert Street?

No , it was North Dublin city.

MingulayJohnny

By that logic then, there is no possibility of any effects whatsoever and therefore there's no point in trying it out since it does nothing. A treatment cannot be said to either cure you or do nothing. If it can cure you, then it can also potentially damage you. That's the complexity of biochemistry for you.

I'm not trained in any scientific discipline but I don't understand why something which has the potential to cure should also have the potential to cause damage. I wouldn't simply believe that homeopathy works just on blind faith. I tried it for myself and it worked and it wasn't just subtle changes it was a vast improvement. Would you be willing to accept that maybe at some stage in the future science will verify that homeopathy does in fact work?.

seamus

MingulayJohnny wrote: »

I'm not trained in any scientific discipline but I don't understand why something which has the potential to cure should also have the potential to cause damage.

All lifeforms are a fairly well-balanced chemical machine. Anything which can demonstrably cure an illness by its very nature must involve the introduction of an extra *something* into the body, which has the potential to harm as well as the potential to cure.

You can die from water poisoning, which I think is fairly conclusive proof that there is no substance on this planet which does not have the potential to harm you. In most cases, doses can be tested and known so that the dose given is unlikely to cause harm and more likely to do good, but people are individual and a harmless dose in one person can be a fatal dose in another. It's all a numbers game.

If homeopathic solutions had medicinal merit, then they would also have the potential to cause harm in the wrong doses. So it's not correct to say, "They'll either help or do nothing", if they have medicinal merit.

And that in fact, is something I would be willing to test - where a homeopath claims that you need 5ml or whatever of a particular solution, I will happily drink a litre of it without ill-effect, thus proving that it's nothing but water.

Would you be willing to accept that maybe at some stage in the future science will verify that homeopathy does in fact work?.

I am willing to accept that at some point in the future, we will better understand the nature of the placebo effect and that we can manipulate the likes of homeopathy and other similar things in order to induce the placebo effect in people and therefore cure them. That doesn't mean that homeopathy "works" any more than a rain dance "works".

But evidence thus far has shown that homeopathy does not work (or at least does not work any better than simply doing nothing), and so I would not be willing to bank on it being likely that homeopathy will be verified as a legitimate form of medicine in the future.

If homeopathy can be scientifically shown to work outside of the placebo effect, then of course I would accept that it works. But thus far, all evidence points to the contrary, so I don't think it merits further consideration.

Rockn

Captain Darling wrote: »

I hate to admit i'm not a pheasant plucker, but a pheasant pluckers son.

And I'm only fúcking peasants... damn I can never get it right.

sink

MingulayJohnny wrote: »

Make what you will of it. I know it works for me and has improved my health far too much to be a placebo effect.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of the placebo effect. The connection between mental state and physical state is in humans is both incredibly powerful and poorly understood.

While a homeopathic treatment might have a neutral pharmacological effect, the strength of the placebo effect can more that make up for it in certain cases.

Medical doctors often prescribe placebos to patients whose symptoms they believe are at least in part psychological. They would not do that if they believed that placebos had no effect.

The difference between a Medical doctor administering a placebo and a homeopath administering a placebo is that the MD is aware that he is administering a placebo and he is doing on a specific case by case basis. A homeopath is under the impression that they are administering a real pharmacological substance with real healing properties and in cases where the patients suffering is caused by physical factors rather psychological factors the homeopathic treatment is guaranteed to fail to the detriment of the patients health.

revz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0

Dave!

ScumLord wrote: »

Are Chiropractors the ones that have that big torture bench that they do adjustments on?

I've been to one of them with a bad back and the results were beneficial I'd say from my lay man's opinion. It wasn't an instant cure but it did improve things.

My mother is big into all these alternative medicines and is in fact a qualified aromatherapist. It's all mostly nonsense bar maybe the use of tea tree oil as a mild antiseptic.

Manipulating the back can of course sometimes have beneficial effects, so if chiropractors stuck to treating back problems then they'd have more legitimacy. I'm pretty sure the jury is still out to some degree, though, even on that. It's when they start using magical thinking and claiming that they can treat other ailments by manipulating the back, then you should question how plausible it is.

BTW, "qualified" aromatherapist

Reminds me of Family Guy:

"I've got a degree in homeopathic medicine!"
"You've got a degree in boloney."

(too lazy to look on YouTube)

Son Of A Vidic

The levels of ignorance displayed by some in here is truly amazing. Coming from a medical background I should be more sceptical than most. I had a troubling back injury years ago, caused by rugby and heavy weightlifting. I used all the conventional medical routes, which was futile. Fortunately a gym buddy gave me the details of a German Chiropractor and I never looked back. The conventional approach wanted medication, medication and mediation only (throwing in the option of radical unnecessary surgery) My Chiropractor had me sorted after about 6 visits. Some 'delusional' mentioned they get certification over a weekend, actually it takes 7 years to qualify. Since then, a lot of cowboys have popped up from the woodwork, motivated by money but that's to be expected. You need to know the schools of training, accreditation bodies and registration boards relevant to the practitioner. But a lot of idiots walk in, see a shiny cert get bad treatment from someone not qualified or regulated and then they smear the profession.

AntiMatter

sink wrote: »

I wouldn't underestimate the power of the placebo effect. The connection between mental state and physical state is in humans is both incredibly powerful and poorly understood.

While a homeopathic treatment might have a neutral pharmacological effect, the strength of the placebo effect can more that make up for it in certain cases.

Medical doctors often prescribe placebos to patients whose symptoms they believe are at least in part psychological. They would not do that if they believed that placebos had no effect.

The difference between a Medical doctor administering a placebo and a homeopath administering a placebo is that the MD is aware that he is administering a placebo and he is doing on a specific case by case basis. A homeopath is under the impression that they are administering a real pharmacological substance with real healing properties and in cases where the patients suffering is caused by physical factors rather psychological factors the homeopathic treatment is guaranteed to fail to the detriment of the patients health.

Homeopathy has been shown to have a better success rate than the placebo effect has, in clinical tests, though.

I've never tried it myself, but I just finished the chapter on homeopathy in the book '13 things that don't make sense', and, experiments, some undertaken by homepathic sceptics, have proven there's more to it than meets the eye, apparently.

Chiropracty I have tried, for various martial arts injuries, when I was living in Spain, and I left cured every time.

Nevermind_

AntiMatter wrote: »

Homeopathy has been shown to have a better success rate than the placebo effect has, in clinical tests, though.

Source? Link?
Was it a double blind test?
There are lots of "clinical tests" carried out in relation to homeopathy that claim to prove it works most of which are debunked quite easily, and are not carried out with the full rigours of a proper scientific analysis.

When a reputable professor/doctor/university has carried out an independently verifiable double blind test, the results are always the same.
Homeopathy = Placebo

but in fairness at least homeopathy has such small traces of anything except water it cant do any harm, and may help induce the placebo effect.

AntiMatter

Nevermind_ wrote: »

Source? Link?
Was it a double blind test?
There are lots of "clinical tests" carried out in relation to homeopathy that claim to prove it works most of which are debunked quite easily, and are not carried out with the full rigours of a proper scientific analysis.

When a reputable professor/doctor/university has carried out an independently verifiable double blind test, the results are always the same.
Homeopathy = Placebo

but in fairness at least homeopathy has such small traces of anything except water it cant do any harm, and may help induce the placebo effect.

My source is the chapter on homepathy, in the recently published book I cited above, '13 things that don't make sense'.

Edit; it would appear to be hard to find a link to support that claim, which is surprising as the author himself is sceptical of homeopathy.

Nevermind_

AntiMatter wrote: »

My source is the chapter on homepathy, in the recently published book I cited above, '13 things that don't make sense'.

Not exactly the new england journal of medicine now is it?
Paper never refused ink, and anyone can say anything they like in a book without it having to be scientifically appraised.
However a published academic paper in a journal is reviewed by peers and experts before a journal will agree to publish it.

I suggest to counterbalance the authors view you read a few reviews of his book such as

http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2009/01/13_things_that_dont_make_sense.php

One thing that always struck me about homeopathy is that it relies on the theory that water has some sort of memory, which is fine but if thats the case why doesnt water remember the millions of tonnes of faeces and germs pumped into it everyday by us humans?

AtomicHorror

Putting aside efficacy, the general chiropractic response to public criticism is litigation. See Simon Singh's case for example. Chiropractors make a claim that chiropractic can treat allergy and asthma, he calls BS and rather than pony up with the evidence, they try to sue him. That's pretty much your classic woo woo warning sign.

AntiMatter wrote: »

Homeopathy has been shown to have a better success rate than the placebo effect has, in clinical tests, though.

My guess would be that this happens when you tell your patients when they're getting a homoeopathic remedy. In other words, a non-blinded trial. The result would be that the placebo would lose it's placebo effect, due to unblinding, and the 'remedy' would gain one.

AntiMatter wrote: »

Chiropracty I have tried, for various martial arts injuries, when I was living in Spain, and I left cured every time.

Trouble is, there isn't another you who didn't go to the chiropractor to compare yourself against. Which means that all you actually know is that you went to the chiropractor, and then you felt better. How many other things did you do before you got better?

Corvus Maximus wrote: »

The levels of ignorance displayed by some in here is truly amazing. Coming from a medical background I should be more sceptical than most. I had a troubling back injury years ago, caused by rugby and heavy weightlifting. I used all the conventional medical routes, which was futile. Fortunately a gym buddy gave me the details of a German Chiropractor and I never looked back. The conventional approach wanted medication, medication and mediation only (throwing in the option of radical unnecessary surgery) My Chiropractor had me sorted after about 6 visits. Some 'delusional' mentioned they get certification over a weekend, actually it takes 7 years to qualify. Since then, a lot of cowboys have popped up from the woodwork, motivated by money but that's to be expected. You need to know the schools of training, accreditation bodies and registration boards relevant to the practitioner. But a lot of idiots walk in, see a shiny cert get bad treatment from someone not qualified or regulated and then they smear the profession.

So, why won't they show the scientific community it works by submitting to large scale randomized clinical trials? If you come from a medical background, you ought to know that lots of stuff can appear to work by temporal association, regression to the mean, placebo effect and so forth. Our minds play tricks with us when it comes to causality. That's why we need trials. Yet the studies chiropractors get involved in tend to be small and poorly designed. So, as a person with a medical background, putting aside your anecdote, how do you know chiropractic works?

Coriolanus

One thing that always struck me about homeopathy is that it relies on the theory that water has some sort of memory, which is fine but if thats the case why doesnt water remember the millions of tonnes of faeces and germs pumped into it everyday by us humans?

You have to bang it off a leather pad seven times or something according to the progenitor.

Ciaran500

Corvus Maximus wrote: »

The levels of ignorance displayed by some in here is truly amazing. Coming from a medical background I should be more sceptical than most. I had a troubling back injury years ago, caused by rugby and heavy weightlifting. I used all the conventional medical routes, which was futile. Fortunately a gym buddy gave me the details of a German Chiropractor and I never looked back. The conventional approach wanted medication, medication and mediation only (throwing in the option of radical unnecessary surgery) My Chiropractor had me sorted after about 6 visits. Some 'delusional' mentioned they get certification over a weekend, actually it takes 7 years to qualify. Since then, a lot of cowboys have popped up from the woodwork, motivated by money but that's to be expected. You need to know the schools of training, accreditation bodies and registration boards relevant to the practitioner. But a lot of idiots walk in, see a shiny cert get bad treatment from someone not qualified or regulated and then they smear the profession.

TBH, I find it hard to believe that a good physio just wanted to push tablets down your throat, or did you go to a physiotherapist?

AtomicHorror

Nevore wrote: »

You have to bang it off a leather pad seven times or something according to the progenitor.

Ok so, you have water, which has had all sorts dissolved in it. Random salts, poo, urine, the hair off my inexplicable shoulders, copious amounts of dead fish, billions of used condoms, coffee grounds, forensic evidence and so forth. And then we dissolve a statically negligible amount of say, Oscillococcinum in that water, bang it on a leather pad, and it 'remembers' the the one thing we want it to remember?

Coriolanus

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Ok so, you have water, which has had all sorts dissolved in it. Random salts, poo, urine, the hair off my inexplicable shoulders, copious amounts of dead fish, billions of used condoms, coffee grounds, forensic evidence and so forth. And then we dissolve a statically negligible amount of say, Oscillococcinum in that water, bang it on a leather pad, and it 'remembers' the the one thing we want it to remember?

something like that. Makes perfect sense, no?

AtomicHorror

Nevore wrote: »

something like that. Makes perfect sense, no?

I'm buying it, yes.

Son Of A Vidic

Ciaran500 wrote: »

TBH, I find it hard to believe that a good physio just wanted to push tablets down your throat, or did you go to a physiotherapist?

I find it hard to believe that you've posted a reply to something that was never in my post, truly amazing! First of all learn to read posts properly - I made no mention of the word Physio or Physiotherapist in my post. So read this carefully - I come from a medical background, so I'll explain to you what the term 'conventional' medical approach means. It's generally refers to a standard treatment/diagnostic/care pathway that it instigated by your initial visit to a G.P. for example = G.P. + Physiotherapist + Orthopaedic referral ect. This route failed me, is that clearer now?

Secondly, A Physiotherapist is not a prescriber of medication nor are they qualified to make such recommendations. So again, what are you on about?