Putting The Stroke Issue to Bed

come through the office had headaches, and they were completely resolved after one adjustment. Therefore, 100% of headaches resolve with one adjustment." That's asinine. We wish that were true, but that's not the reality of the world. The same thing happens in the literature out there is that, when people run with a case study, positively or negatively, if we, as chiropractors, assert because we have a patient that had a great resolution of a problem of a given nature, and we run with that and say, "Chiropractic can address this," that's as wrong as them running with it and saying, "Chiropractic can cause this" in the other direction, in the negative direction. We need to be careful about how we're behaving on our side of the aisle and then, at the same time, we need to hold them accountable on their side of the aisle. The articles that I made reference to before, the Vickers, the Dunn, and the Mann, none of them, none of them have the epidemiological power to assert causation or incidence data or incidence of occurrence of dissection associated with, let alone caused by, a chiropractic adjustment. This house of cards get built up with the improper use of substandard data that has to be displaced by proper data that's properly used, and that's the discussion that we're talking about today. You're absolutely right that, once things get into the literature, they do take on a life of their own, and we have to deal with it. For example, the case that you made relevance to relevant to activator care, I had a chance to review that article, which was really quite interesting but, if I'm understanding I properly, they're suggesting that an elderly woman had a hemorrhage in her occipital lobe as a result of an activator thrust at the cervical/cranial junction. It's not even a vertebral artery dissection. They're saying that the activator, through the skull, caused a hemorrhage in the occipital lobe of the brain. If it's a stretch, no pun intended, for an activator to cause a vertebral artery, how far do you have to stretch to think about an activator being applied to the craniocervical junction causing a hemorrhage inside the brain. It's crazy-making in that regard. It's not biologically possible in any shape, form, or fashion. They did, in the article, say that they've never seen anything like this in history. Well, yeah, that's true because it's Haley's Comet. It's going to come around once every 482 years or whatever, and it hasn't got anything to do with what you're wearing that day or who you went to or what you drank or what you ate. It's going to happen. Those things happen, and they need to be put in the proper context. As our colleagues grapple with these things, I come across two attitudes. One, people that are overwrought with concern about this, to the point that it becomes crippling and gets in the way of them living their professional lives and doing the good they can do, and the other end of the spectrum that blows if off completely.

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