"Doctors" of chiropractic learning real medicine

Of the many toolish personalities I routinely encounter at my Caribbean medical school the most pitiful, the most grating must be the unrepentant chiropractor. Medical schools such as mine attract many former chiropractors because most American medical schools view a former affiliation with the profession as a disqualification. Aside from the shear ridiculousness of the theory that underlies chiropractic and the shadiness of its practices, one of the problems chiropractors pose to genuine medical educators is the conviction that they already know something about health care. One such character is in my PBL group. Not a week goes by without the suggestion that he is qualified to augment the instruction presented to us by our professors because of his ten years “practicing” chiropractic. He wants to offer another perspective. He is always first to get up and demonstrate an examination technique because he's done it so many times before. Never mind the fact that he almost invariably has a different way of doing things than the faculty of the school. He finds it difficult to unlearn his way because it made so much sense. He gushes over the economy of the chiropractic way of doing things.

Please spare me. Describing yourself as a qualified medical practitioner on the basis of an education at a college of chiropractic is tantamount to insisting that you are qualified to fly a 737 across the country because you have 40 hours of instruction in a Cessna. The fact that you were once a chiropractor calls in to question not only your judgment, but also your grasp on ethics. Chiropractors are notorious for duping their patients into needless courses of treatment. Their professional expertise is in practice building rather than the actual delivery of healing modalities. They try to hang their single out as an alternative to primary care physicians, and yet they have no ability to accurately diagnose or competently treat even a problem with the back.

The fact that one has already been to a professional school and would then put him or herself through another should be a sign that something is amiss with the first attempted profession. Many chiropractors are good people who will admit that there was just too much hokum in their original course of study, so they have come back to learn the real deal. Many of these folks did learn some useful information at their former schools, like anatomy, and are able to keep things in the proper perspective as to the areas of knowledge they lack and need to be real doctors. I admire the chiropractor who wants to become a real doctor and is ready to humble him or herself, come back to school, and learn how really to treat patients. But the ones who think they already know something need to consider why they've come back to school, and maybe keep their former associations to themselves.

Don't buy my rant? Check out some well researched sites on the matter:

http://www.quackwatch.org
http://www.rebuildyourback.com/chiropractic/school.php