Putting The Stroke Issue to Bed

18 to 24 months, maybe a little bit longer, regarding the whole subject of Cervical Spine Adjusting and Vertebral Artery Issues. Let's get right to it and jump into it. I mean Stu, I can do my part here, and we shall be in business momentarily. There we go.

Dr. Stu Hoffman:

Perfect, [let's play 00:03:38].

All right, great. Well, it is January 20 th ; 2:00 pm has already past, Eastern Time. It's time to get down to business. Probably the most important thing that's happened in the past year or so has been the Physician Paper that was released by the American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association. You can imagine that when rumblings were going on that this document was being prepared and that it was going to be published at some point down the road. There are a lot of nervous people around the profession wondering what our colleagues from the Heart Association and what our colleagues from the Stroke Association were going to say about the concept of cervical artery dissection, particularly as it relates to cervical spine adjustment or in their language, "Cervical spine manipulation." The good news is I'll cut to the chase and give you the good news, is the paper was remarkably positive for us. Now, there are things in there that I disagree with and I'll point some of those out to you, but for the most part they took a pretty factual approach to things. I would like to take a few minutes and just go through the first page or so and the overview of the paper that was published by the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association earlier this year. This came out in electronic form in the second quarter of the year and came out in print form in this third quarter of the year. Let's look at the purpose of the discussion. The Cervical Artery Dissections, CDs are among the most common causes of stroke in young and middle age adults, that's true. Statistically 10% to 25% of all strokes that occur in that community, in young and middle age people are the product of cervical artery dissection. That's simply a fact of anatomy and physiology and pathology. The aim of this scientific statement is to review the current state of evidence and the diagnosis of management of a cervical dissection and their statistical association with cervical manipulative therapy. Obviously you know many people in the profession and beyond use the term, "Cervical manipulatable therapy and movement adjustment." I prefer the word "Adjustment" and so on.

Dr. Gerry Clum:

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