As promised yesterday, here’s the rest of my unfocused ramblings on the BCA vs Dr Singh ruckus
On the other hand though I’m a trained masseur, with over ten years experience of treating a variety of conditions, though I tend to specialise in back problems. From my own experience I know that there are good physiological explanations for why soft tissue, and bone, manipulation can help with some conditions, and even witnessed positive results from acupressure, which is somewhat harder to explain. But in anycase, I’m sure that chiropractic treatments can be effective for treating some conditions, I just find some of their claims a little wooly and nebulous.
I’ve also experienced the bias which many conventional doctors have when it comes to any form of complementary health care, and I have to wonder whether Dr Singh falls into this category; although actually he’s not a medical doctor, instead having gained his PhD in particle physics, something which the Independent’s article neglects to mention. The reason why I wonder whether Dr Singh is totally impartial is his use of the term “alternative medicine” in the title of the book he co-authored with Exeter University’s Professor of Complementary health, Edzard Ernst. Alternative medicine is in itself a loaded term, it implies that the treatment is a replacement for modern “conventional” medicine, rather than something which can be used in combination with conventional treatments. Some conditions are best treated conventionally, others can be more effectively treated with, for example, massage, yet other conditions can be best treated with a combination of the two approaches.
The term “alternative medicine” is actually a pet hate of mine, & I’d be less inclined to trust a practitioner who described themselves as “alternative” rather than “complementary”; It’s a tiny semantic difference, but to my mind it hints at an underlying attitude and one which does the reputation of complentary health as a whole absolutely no favours. In short, as someone who considers themselves an ethical and sensible practitioner I worry that the term “alternative”, along with treatment forms which promise great results with little evidence to back them up, undermine the credibility of respectable practitioners. Although part of the problem is that so many different treatment forms are labelled under the umbrella of “complementary”.
In anycase, I wonder whether Dr Singh’s agenda is as much about creating a name for himself, as it is about investigating which Complementary health forms have real therapeutic merit, but at the same time am also highly sceptical of chiropracty, or more specifically some of the ailments they claim to be able to treat through spinal manipulation.
Certainly if I judge that a client of mine might benefit from bone manipulation I’d always advise seeking out a good osteopath, rather than a chiropractor, from my knowledge of the two disciplines I’d say that osteopathy has a more solid root in accepted science.
Tags: Science