Chiropractic

[ska]

Sorry, Barnaby, but since you've made a comment about chiropractic that is not really related to the thread, I'll chip in my two cents.

For the record, we should be equally skeptical about the allopathic paradigm and its practices, which cause far more deaths, through iatrogenic illness (disease caused by medical intervention) and nosocomial infection (infections contracted in clinical settings) than chiropractic. 

[Barnaby_McEwan]

No need to apologise. I agree that it's important to be skeptical about all medical treatments: I'm skeptical about biochemical explanations of mental illness, for example. Allopathic medicine certainly isn't perfect but unlike chiropractic it offers proven benefits. If chiropractic was a drug it would have been banned long ago or never made it beyond preliminary trials, since though expensive it has no proven benefits and is potentially lethal.

That's not surprising when you consider that its inventor, D. D. Palmer, was a grocer before becoming a 'magnetic healer' and deciding that all disease is caused by displaced vertebrae. These days I guess he'd have become a Reiki master. At least they don't actively kill people.