Sister, My Sister

"Complementary and Alternative Medicine is mostly modern superstitious drivel marketed to people who are, in their knowledge of science and reason, no better than seventh century peasants except that Dark Age peasants had an excuse to be ignorant as they had marauding Norsemen competing for their attention. 

On the other hand most people don’t think about medicine that much and have no reason to distrust their chiropractor so allow me clear something up for you: Chiropractors, naturopaths and other Alternative Medicine practitioners do not have the same training and education as medical doctors, not in quality and not in quantity, not by a long shot, and therefore they are not qualified to serve as primary care physicians, a job that requires more than some haphazard study of herb lore or a cursory knowledge of the spine. If they had the same training including residency training they would be qualified…but they don’t so they’re not.

Take your typical chiropractor, for example.  He has a four-year degree at an institution that was probably nothing but a federal student loan processing mill in which the odds are he never saw a really sick patient, at least not one that wasn’t immediately taken to the nearest Emergency Department.  Unlike your Family Physician who has four years of medical school followed by an intensive three year residency, your chiropractor has never rotated on a pediatric ward, in the Intensive Care Unit, on an internal medicine service, a surgery service, or any other of the medical services in which the core knowledge of every physician is developed.  He has done no call, been responsible for exactly nothing during his brief pseudo-medical training and has never had to make a decision that mattered to anybody. 

More than likely he slithered through chiropractic school making a mental list of the many, many things he would never have to worry about (I mean, assuming he was introspective enough for this) and that he would defer to real doctors.  He is, therefore along with his naturopath cousins eminently unsuited to recognize, diagnose, and treat general medical complaints.

The funny thing is that I would never try to pass myself off as a surgeon, an obstetrician, an internist, or a neurologists because I lack the training and knowledge to honestly represent myself to the public as something I am not…

And yet naturopaths, chiropractors, and the whole pack of Snake Oil Salesmen with a fraction of the training required for the job lack the humility, the self-awareness that comes with an appreciation of their own limitations, to consider that maybe, just maybe, they don’t know enough to be primary care physicians.

No doubt your Chiropractor can fill out forms with the best of them and correctly bill your insurance company but if you have a medical problem serious enough to warrant treatment you should see a real doctor and eliminate the useless middleman. Likewise if you really care about your long-term health.

Not to mention that the primary treatment modalities of practioners of Complementary and Alternative Medicine are extremely ridiculous on a fifth grade biology level. 

To believe in them, things like subluxations and Reiki, is to place yourself in the company of drooling cretins."

-- Panda Bear, M.D., beating the NewAge bastards about the head - with a stethoscope! - at our renowned "sister" blog, Panda Bear, M.D..