Putting The Stroke Issue to Bed

The references that you cited are so in contrast to these numbers, how could they just simply ignore it if they didn't have their own motivation. I'm not asking you to even respond to that. That's just my point of view on it. Is there more to this that we're waiting on? Is there more to it that we can do because, as I said, I know you've gone back and forth, not just with Baylor, but with Vanderbilt also and, so far, really more of a stonewall. That's true. In terms of next steps, the only thing that we can do at this point is be diligent. Early on in these discussions relative to this whole subject area, Allan Terrett in Australia produced a magnificent monograph where he went back, and he researched every single piece of literature that had made reference to a chiropractor related to a stroke, and he found, right off the bat, that more than half of them, a chiropractor was never involved. The first thing we need to do is, we need to study the literature that comes out on this subject and hold the authors accountable to what they say. More recently than Allan Terrett's work, Adrian Wenban in Europe at the Barcelona College which, by the way, was accredited over the weekend, and we're very happy for Adrian and his colleagues in Barcelona. Adrian has run to ground a number of misstatements from different authors, particularly in Europe, and has been able to get letters of correction into the literature. The whole goal of this process is to get more information, more correct information, into the literature to be able to offset and to begin to erode the garbage literature from decades ago that still pops up, like the Vickers piece. The Vickers assumption, again, purely a guess but, as you noted in the literature that I talked about from Rothwell to Cassidy to Kosloff and on to Church, they all have good, solid case-controlled, case-crossover data upon which epidemiological conclusions can be drawn. When you have that data and you look at those conclusions, they're light years apart from that 1 in 20,000 discussion in Vickers. The goal in this process is to bring a focused point of view to the author that wrote the piece that you have concerns with, to get it into the literature, to get a correction statement in there that, whenever that's used, we have something else to make reference to and not let a misstatement perpetuate on its own without response. If you're not the editor of that journal, you don't control what's going to go into that journal but, if we don't speak up, we know for a fact it'll never get corrected. The process that, from my side, that I've been involved in and many others have been, is how can we keep the authors honest in relationship to what they write about us and the incidents data and so on. From the practitioners' side, the value is that, when they're confronted with a number, they need to understand that there's a way to deal with it and put it in context that is logical, rational, data-driven, and evidence-based as opposed to being opinion-based. When I'm out, including this last weekend, talking to a number of doctors about the whole stroke blame-game, some of them will say to me, "Well, I'm an

Dr. Clum:

Dr. Hoffman:

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