Putting The Stroke Issue to Bed

as being the bane of their life and obviously picked Katie Mays, but we had no input to that. We had no control over that, and we just have to deal with their discussions as they come forward. As far as the part that the profession was involved in, I think we were well represented. I think we put important elements on the table in the course of the six-and-a-half-minute segment that represents us well. It's up to the individual chiropractor now to carry on from that point forward. I wanted to chime in. One of the things for our doctors to all remember is if a patient comes in to you and there is any adverse situation, stop playing the hero. We've said this over and over and over again. Nine-one-one is on your phone for a reason. Separate and distinct from that, you still need to use an appropriate informed consent. We spent years at this point developing one that is workable for both the doctor and the patient, and document, document, document, because the more information that you have, the better off you're going to be as the doctor. So many doctors call me up. I had one literally on Monday saying with a potential dissection issue, and he said, "But there's no issue because I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything wrong." Well, we all agree, and the doctor that did see Katie May probably says the same exact thing. We probably would agree with him, but it doesn't matter. In the court of public opinion we still have this association, and all of this media hype is not going to help it. You do need to not be practicing from a defensive posture, but you do need to be aware and take care of your own documentation and your own practice basically, everything that you've always thought. That's absolutely true. We're assuming good practices are being undertaken by our chiropractors in terms of the proper history, the proper examinations and so on and the proper cautions when signs and symptoms present themselves and the proper documentation, as you said. It's frustrating, as you and I have dealt with cases in this environment that do move on to litigation, more often than not the biggest problem in the defense of the case is the records of the practitioner in making sure their records are complete and thorough and that they don't require your mind, conversation or presence to be able to interpret them, that they speak for themselves, and that they're direct and they're straightforward in that regard. There's another aspect of this that we need to be aware of and need to be ready for, frankly, is that in Saskatchewan many, many years ago following a very high- profile circumstance similar to Katie May in that province, there was an inquest, and following that there was a significant uptick in the allegations associated with adjusting and dissection. In the fullness of time they dropped off very dramatically and dropped back to the background level that they had existed before, but following the publicity there was an uptick in allegations and so on.

Dr. Hoffman:

Dr. Clum:

We need to anticipate the same thing, that there will be people that will be hyper-

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