So, if facetguy has watched the "Miranda" video (lady in the orange shirt and black Hammer pants), especially at 7:35, he will hear that DCs are the ONLY people trained to repair and heal vertebral "subluxations" and that's the common thought for those not sure of what a DO does and this is why I brought that perspective up.
I've now watched "Miranda". I don't know, JG, I think the Hammer pants are workin' for her. You'd hit that.
But anyway...
This is directed, of course, at CDMguy: Any attempts to link "Miranda's" talk to Jonestown are disgusting. And such a link is so far from reality that I'm really beginning to think you're slipping away.
But back to the talk. The first 6 minutes or so I have no problem with. She is imploring her audience to begin to think about their health and where they are headed health-wise. She's right in that we all could do better in that department. Medicine could do a lot better in that department as well, and everyone knows it so don't even try to argue that point.
For the next minute or two she goes into the subluxation/misaligned bone irritating a nerve thing, which I've discussed my disagreement with here on plenty of occasions. There just isn't much evidence that says spinal manipulation affects the viscera in any predictable way. Are there plenty of anecdotal cases suggesting some correlation between spinal manipulation and any number of non-MSK-related improvements? Of course, but at this point they are only anecdotes. Osteopathy has these stories as well.
And speaking of anecdotes, she finishes her talk with an uplifting story about a guy making miraculous improvements in his condition. Yes, n=1, anecdotal etc. But as a speaker you want to leave your audience with a positive message, so I don't really question her selection of that story. I would say that most chiros have some "miracle" story that can't really be explained, so perhaps this is hers.
Returning to the subluxation issue again, while I disagree with the way she describes things, I do believe that injuries or dysfunctions or functional lesions (or osteopathic somatic lesions) occur at the spinal level that involve the nervous system and that cause problems. I don't think it's as simple as BOOPers would have us believe, but there's something going on nonetheless.
A way I prefer to look at things is this. Single trauma or cumulative microtrauma causes subfailure injuries of the ligaments and embedded mechanoreceptors. The injured mechanoreceptors generate corrupted transducer signals, which lead to corrupted muscle response pattern produced by the neuromuscular control unit. Muscle coordination and individual muscle force characteristics, i.e. onset, magnitude, and shut-off, are disrupted. This results in abnormal stresses and strains in the ligaments, mechanoreceptors and muscles, and excessive loading of the facet joints. Due to inherently poor healing of spinal ligaments, accelerated degeneration of disc and facet joints may occur. The abnormal conditions may persist, and, over time, may lead to chronic back pain via inflammation of neural tissues.
This, in my view, is more likely to be what a 'subluxation' is. And, by the way, that last paragraph isn't my words. They are the words of Manohar Panjabi. If you don't yet know the name, you will if you study the spine even remotely. It's taken from this article, which I suggest you all read to get a better understanding of where at least a part of the current science is going:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489327/
When it comes to mechanisms of back pain, as well as mechanisms of spinal manipulation, no one knows 100% what's happening. That's why Panjabi speaks in terms of hypothesis. But the search continues, and the chiropractic profession is part of that search.
The chiro shares a waiting room with other providers (of completely different persuasions which I was involved with) and you can hear her speaking with patients from the waiting room. I am under the impression that it's just one big room at the end of a short hall with a constantly open door because you can hear the entire conversation and the next patient often says "hey I heard you talking about X with the last patient tell me more about that." It's kind of weird.
