Well, this time it’s ThinkAtheist on which some dissenting voices have taken issue with my unappreciative attitude toward alternative therapies. It’s good to be reminded that not everyone identifying as an atheist, or even as a skeptic, will always mindlessly or homologously follow along with all the same principles and ideas as you. I’m going to post my response here to a couple of comments on my last post about Simon Singh’s legal appeal.
Okay, I’m not going to provide a comprehensive response to all the above (at least not on Friday night when there’s pizza to be had and DVDs to be slouched in front of), but I have a couple of things:
First of all, on this subject, I’m glad I’m not one of the people in charge of making any important decisions, or whose opinions hold much sway on anything. There’s a lot I don’t know, and a lot of points on which I’m not sufficiently informed to be insistent.
One thing that seems to be clear, though, is that there’s a great deal of variety in what comes under the heading of “chiropractic”. I’m still in the middle of the relevant chapter in Singh’s book at the moment, but the division between “mixers” and “straights” (which may be only unofficial and somewhat slang-y terms) seems an important one. A lot of working chiropractors who are also well versed in mainstream medicine may be doing a great deal of good out there in treating people for back and neck pain.
But the original formulation of chiropractic does seem, as Matthew says, “a bit nutty”, to say the last. Its ideas about subluxations and “innate intelligence” don’t seem to be remotely based in reality, or supported by any evidence that such things exist. It was initially claimed that almost all ailments originated in misalignments of the vertebrae, and for some time chiropractic completely denied the germ theory of disease. These are very shaky foundations on which to base a branch of medicine and claim that it can do so many wonderful things.
As for evidence of its effectiveness in treating all those problems… Well, it really doesn’t seem to be there. I’d love to research this in more depth at some point, and cite actual case studies, and examine the specific data which supposedly counts in its favour, but that won’t be tonight. For now, I’m going to carry on letting smarter and better-informed people than me decide what counts as good scientific evidence, but the consensus doesn’t seem to be on your side. But however ill acquainted I am with the literature, I do know that “I know as I’ve seen it in my office” is a long way from being scientifically relevant. The plural of anecdote still isn’t data.
As for the dangerous side effects, the same thing applies about doing some more research another day, otherwise any discussion won’t become any more interesting than something you’d find in Monty Python’s argument clinic. I don’t know that much about the facts, which is why I’m not doing anything like campaigning for any particular chiropractic practices to be outlawed. Again, smarter people, etc. One example I will mention, though, from the exact page my bookmark happens to be at the moment, is of a Canadian study in 2001, which showed that “patients under forty-five years of age who had suffered torn arteries were five times more likely to have visited a chiropractor in the week prior to the damage being recognised than healthy individuals of a similar age”. And they have enough other numbers to make me wonder whether the rage you have such a hard time containing isn’t at least a little to do with wounded pride.
I’ve still left a lot un-addressed, but this has already gone on longer than I’d planned. What I would want to make clear, though, is that this post wasn’t intended to be any kind of polemic against the entire field of chiropractic treatment. I am saving anything of that sort until I’ve looked into it more carefully. My main point here was about this court case, and how unhelpful I think it is to launch a financially crippling lawsuit over scientifically defensible criticism, in place of providing any supporting evidence.
This may sound like a strange thing to say, but I’m actually glad that things like this come up periodically. They remind us that atheism is no guarantee of rationality. I’ve run across atheists who believe in all sorts of nonsense, and each time, it reminds me about exactly what atheism is and what it is not.