Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 15, 1994 TAG: 9405080148
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by SIDNEY BARRITT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
J. Stuart Moore is an assistant professor of history at Radford University. His book is neither an uncritical chiropractic view of the wondrous cures wrought by this method nor a hypercritical AMA diatribe bemoaning its disturbing lack of scientific underpinning.
It is nicely in between, right about where an honest historian's view of a controversial subject ought to be. Moore begins with the founder, D.D. Palmer, and his first attempts to establish his "science" after several attempts at other careers failed miserably. The story concludes with Moore's impressions of where chiropractic will fit as it begins its second century of aspiration as a healing method.
Indeed, I have long been a skeptic of chiropractic.
The overblown theories of its founder have clearly been demonstrated to be airy nonsense time and time again, but patients do tell me that they have been helped by chiropractic manipulation often after orthodox physicians have failed them. Then too, still other patients have not been helped any more by heterdoxy than by orthodoxy. And while the woes of traditional medicine in regard to misdiagnosis and misapplication of technology have been amply documented, so too have the sins of chiropractic.
Moore cites several studies from the orthodox medical literature wherein chiropractic is compared to traditional medicine in the treatment of chronic back pain. I tried to bring the same skeptic's eye to a critical review of two papers that were published in medical, not chiropractic, journals. The particular studies I reviewed came from Utah and England respectively. One was done retrospectively and the other prospectively. Both concluded that the competing therapies were roughly equivalent with minor advantages accruing to either depending on which measure of success was regarded.
Moore concludes that chiropractic has established itself not by the overwhelming weight of scientific theory, but by the more pragmatic route of a series of individual successes. The science behind chiropractic is yet to be developed, but there are similar examples to behold in traditional medicine, where practical success preceded scientific understanding by decades, if not centuries. The use of the drug digitalis is but one example.
The prose is suitable to the issue at hand and to the format of a scholarly history. The book and its references will serve both the curiosity of the casual reader and the thirst of the serious student of chiropractic.
Sidney Barritt is a Roanoke physician.
by CNB