If there's a chance that someone
reacted badly to essential oils then all essential oils are demonized. A
celebrity chef in Australia was hammered in the media a few years ago for
saying changing our diet could fix 90% plus of our health problems, and while
science is on his side, the media made him out to be crazy!
But we don't bat an eyelid at these
numbers - 251,000 deaths per year in the USA from medical error, or over
300,000 deaths per year from adverse reactions due to pharmaceutical drugs in
Europe and the USA combined.
How does all this relate to
Chiropractic? Well in 2016, a celebrity model, Katie May, died of a stroke. There were
headline claims made in the media and by her family that her stroke occurred
after seeing a Chiropractor. Some of these headlines even falsely stated
that Chiropractic caused her death!
On January 29, 2016 she tweeted that
she had pinched a nerve in her neck and was off to see the chiropractor. On
January 31 she tweeted that she was going again the next day. Later that day,
following her tweet about “going back to the chiropractor tomorrow” she was
admitted to hospital, lost consciousness and was placed on life support, only
to pass away a few days later with cause of death being brain death due to
stroke.
She originally saw the chiropractor
after injuring her neck during a photo shoot, and while the exact mechanism of
injury is uncertain, some reports suggested that she fell and struck her head
and neck.
Following an inquiry into her death,
the coroner’s office listed
the causes of death as brain infarction, vertebral artery dissection, blunt
force trauma to the neck, and the manner of death was described as “accident.”
But then after media pressure that same office issued a statement saying that
her death was caused by a chiropractic adjustment, even though that's not what
the evidence showed nor did their autopsy reveal that it had anything to do
with it.
One of the biggest issues here is that when two
events occur in a similar time frame we immediately label one as causing the
other. The problem is in some early research, there were some findings showing
that if you had a stroke, there was a slight increased chance that you’d been
to the chiropractor in the week leading up to it, and so researchers wondered
if Chiropractic adjustments were causing these strokes. But they could never
prove that chiropractic caused it, just that there seemed to be this
statistical correlation.
Other researchers noted that because neck pain and
headaches are early symptoms of stroke in over 2 out of 3 patients, perhaps
people were having a stroke and went to the chiropractor thinking it was normal
mechanical issues, and then as the stroke progressed, chiropractors were
immediately blamed for causing it.
So to answer this question of are chiropractic
adjustments occasionally causing strokes, or are people already having a stroke
and just happen to go to the chiropractor, 2 very high quality studies have
been performed. Plus, there’s many more on the way!
The Cassidy study published in 2008
looked at the association between chiropractic visits or primary care physician
visits and subsequent vertebral artery stroke occurrence (the type of strokes
initially labelled as potentially caused by the chiropractor). They reported
on 818 of these particular strokes in a population of more than 100 million
person years. Huge numbers, but also showing how rare these types of strokes
are in general!
They found that in people aged over 45
there was no statistical association between chiropractic care and strokes at
all and therefore no possible way a chiropractic adjustment could be the cause.
In patients under 45 years of age, there was a small statistical increase in
chance that you had seen your chiropractor OR primary care physician in the
week leading up to your stroke. But the statistical chance was equal for both
groups. So you were just as likely to have seen your MD as you were a
chiropractor before the stroke occurred.
MD's don't adjust people's necks, yet
were just as likely to see someone before they had a stroke. Due to these
findings, the authors were able to fairly conclusively conclude that this
so-called “associated risk” of stroke when going to a chiropractor is actually
due to the patient seeking care for symptoms of the arterial dissection that is
starting to cause the stroke and not due to the actual treatment rendered.
This makes sense because if someone
suffers from neck pain or headaches, the two most likely places they would go
are their chiropractor or MD.
Another more recent study came to very
similar conclusions. In 2015, Kosloff et al, performed a similar study that
included 1829 Vertebral artery strokes in almost 40 million health plan
members in the USA over 3 years. No significant association between
chiropractic care and the risk of strokes were found, even in the under 45
years of age group. But there was actually a significant association between
primary care doctor visits and vertebral artery strokes.
We know most MD’s aren’t adjusting or
manipulating people’s necks, so we don’t accuse them of causing the stroke.
Instead we can safely make the assumption that once again this association
exists because people are seeking the help of their MD for the symptoms they’re
suffering from being caused by early stage stroke.
So the take home message is this - The risk of having a
stroke after seeing a chiropractor is no greater, and in some cases is even
less, than the risk of having a stroke after seeing a medical doctor. People
who suffer from a stroke after seeing a chiropractor most likely went to see
the chiropractor in the first place because they had neck pain or headaches
that are early symptoms of the stroke that’s already started to occur.
One other large scale scientific review that is
worth mentioning was performed by Ephraim Church and others (not
chiropractors). They looked at all of the small papers that had tried to
conclude that spinal manipulation could even cause cervical artery dissection
in the first place. Not only was there a conclusion that there was no causal
link, but they pulled apart the many weaknesses of the papers that tried to
conclude otherwise.
Their conclusion was: Patients with
neck pain are more likely to visit a chiropractor than patients without neck
pain. Patients with neck pain or headaches may already have a dissection in
progress before they visit a chiropractor. Therefore, chiropractic did not
cause the dissection and stroke.
The key findings are all consistent: Vertebral artery strokes
are very rare anyway, and nothing has been able to link chiropractic to being
the cause, but instead people are actually having the stroke anyway. These
types of stroke are actually so rare that it’s hard to link anything at all to
the cause of them!
Once again we continue to show that
chiropractic has an enviable safety record! In fact there’s even studies going
on right now showing how chiropractic can actually help stroke victims recover.
It’s very exciting stuff!
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