Wednesday 17 June 2009

Quack go the chiropractors

In resorting to legal action against their scientific critics, chiropractors are showing they have no more claim to respect than Scientologists, who famously substitute legal muscle for rational discourse.

That is the only conclusion one can draw from a Chiropractors Association complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority about comments made against them on Breakfast TV by Dr Shaun Holt, and a recent court action in London brought in an attempt to silence another prominent critic. (News on both here. See Holt’s comments and the chiropractors’ on-air response here.)

Keeping his cool, Dr Holt says he is “disappointed” about. the complaint.  “Scientific debate shouldn’t be settled by legal muscle,” he says, “but rather through open discussion in medical and mainstream literature.”  Quite right.

If people have disagreements with the credibility of a treatment, which [in this case] is chiropracty, shouldn’t they be settled by producing evidence and references to good scientific literature and research, rather than getting settled through the courts?

One may draw their own conclusions from chiropractors’ preference for the courts.

3 comments:

Falafulu Fisi said...

I challenged the president of the NZ Homeopathy Society (Mt Eden) head office about a year and a half ago to have a public scientific debate with the members of their organization, but he refused. He knew that he didn't want me to embarrass them in public because he saw that I could drown them in the debate with irrefutable scientific evidence.

It is typical that mystics & faith healers always avoid scientific debate on their practices since they know that they don't have scientific evidence. All they have is belief.

The irony of this is that the government is going to fund (perhaps partially to start with) these alternative medicine practices with taxpayer dollars.

B Whitehead said...

My experience of chiropracters is that they don't fix problems, they just alleviate them temporarily.

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