Instagram followers and was a major social media force. You can see why this could be such a potential public relations nightmare, she died unexpectedly at the age of 34, leaving behind a 7 year old daughter from complications of a stroke. As her family confirmed, and one of the circumstances that they are trying to determine is, was this caused by the chiropractor she had seen right before the time of her stroke? Remember, she also went to the chiropractor because she had fallen and hit her head earlier that day. The second is a recent Reader's Digest article which was put out on MSN. It was called "The 9 Plain Truths About Alternative Medicine Doctors Desperately Want You to Know," which was related to chiropractic care and stroke, which advised that no one should have their neck adjusted by a chiropractor. Wow, could you even imagine that? This had to be regurgitated from 2010 from MSN just to put out there again. Let's take a look at the incidents of stroke and the predisposing factors. We do not want to trivialize the fact that these events do happen and that the number of doctors being accused or involved in a malpractice suit regarding stroke has been on the rise. I'd like to put a little bit of focused attention on the incidents of stroke in the United States. From the literature, we can appreciate the fact that there are approximately 700,000 strokes of any kind that occur in the United States per year. Now, the first thing we need to recognize is that's probably a very soft number. The idea that that is a solid, firm, take it to the bank number that there are 700,000 strokes period per year just isn't reality. It's probably a very good guess, but it's not the reality of the day. That being said we can begin to extrapolate what the likelihood on a population basis would be for a stroke to occur. If we'd begin with the assumption that we have a population in the United States of 300 million people and we have an incidence rate of 700,000 strokes per year, then do the math and it comes out to approximately 233 strokes of any kind, any nature, any type per 100,000 population. Now it's been reported in the literature that the incidence of vertebral artery dissection is 1 per 100,000 population. If we use this data and extract it a little bit further, that would mean that there's approximately 3,000 cases of vertebral artery dissection occurring in the United States on an annual basis. The important point for us at this moment, is to understand that the infinite majority of these cases occur in the course of patients' lives that don't involve a chiropractor in any shape, form, or fashion. The fact that there is a subset of these data that is related to or associated with chiropractic care in some way, whether it's temporal or causative, is an area that demands our attention and why we're even bothering with this lecture today. Getting down to the idea of what is the incidence data associated with this basic phenomenon involving chiropractic is a very hard number. From my perspective and looking at the literature, as well as the experience over 35 years, at the college for 25 years at Life West and practice before that, the concept I think is reasonably
Dr. Gerry Clum:
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