Horrifying truth about chiropractors and why paralysis, strokes and deaths are far more common than you'd imagine: Professor EDZARD ERNST reveals the results of 30-year investigation
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Things had never been so good for 34-year-old model Katie May as in early 2016.
The US influencer had recently been crowned the ‘Queen of Snapchat’ by Playboy magazine due to her massive following on the picture-sharing social media app. On Instagram, she had amassed an astonishing two million followers.
And Katie had gained this massive success all while raising her seven-year-old daughter Mia.
But, for Katie, everything would change in a matter of seconds – and a few sharp movements of her neck.
While on a photoshoot in Los Angeles, Katie pinched a nerve in her neck which left her in agony. Desperate for relief, she made an appointment with a chiropractor – an alternative therapist who offer hands-on adjustments allegedly to relieve problems with the bones, muscles and joints.
There are more than 10 million chiropractor appointments every year in the UK and 35 million in the US. However, sometimes, such as in the case of Katie May, it can go catastrophically wrong.
While treating Katie, the chiropractor twisted her neck and severed an artery in her upper spine that supplies blood from the heart to the brain.
Katie suffered a stroke and was admitted to hospital several hours later where she eventually died.
Katie’s tragic death made headlines in the US at the time. People were shocked by what had happened because most assumed that visiting a chiropractor was not only safe, but also beneficial.
After all, many likely reasoned, how could chiropractors be legally allowed to practice if it wasn’t safe?
However, as I discovered when I embarked on my 30-years of investigating the evidence behind the practice of chiropractic, what is most shocking is that serious complications like those Katie May suffered are far more common than anyone realises – but all too often go unreported.
I wasn’t always a chiropractic sceptic.
When I trained as a junior doctor in Germany in the early 1980s, I learned hands on spinal manipulation techniques designed to relieve pain in patients with back problems.
Later, as the head of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Vienna, we used such techniques routinely.
But my opinion of the practice changed when, in 1993, I became chair of the department of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter.
At that point, I was tasked with analysing the science behind alternative therapies.
It was when researching the evidence behind chiropractic that I received the biggest surprise. While many of these techniques are used regularly, there was next to no evidence that spinal manipulations are effective at reducing pain or curing any other condition.
Even worse, it appeared that many patients were suffering injuries at the hands of chiropractors.
Our research showed that around half of all patients who see a chiropractor and undergo spinal manipulation suffer from side effects – typically pain and stiffness.
These symptoms are usually not severe and normally disappear after a few days.
However, I also began to catalogue a long list of patients who suffered serious complications after chiropractic manipulations, including strokes, bone fractures, paralysis and death.
Chiropractors have long argued that these events are rare. But the truth is that nobody really knows because there is no system in the UK – or in any other country – which monitors such events.
In 2001, my team and I at Exeter asked all members of the Association of British Neurologists to keep track of the number of patients they saw suffering complications within 24 hours of seeing a chiropractor.
Over just one year, our monitoring unearthed a total of 35 cases where patients had suffered chiropractor-related injuries.
These included several strokes, subdural haematomas – a life-threatening bleed between the skull and the brain – and serious spinal cord injuries.
Particularly striking was that none of these cases had previously been reported in medical literature or anywhere else.
This raised a terrifying question: just how many British patients had been severely injured by a chiropractor?
It’s important to note that not all chiropractors are created equal.
The most dangerous are those who take the words of the creator of chiropractic, Daniel David Palmer, as gospel.
Palmer, was a self-described ‘magnetic healer’ who, 120 years ago, claimed the principles of spinal manipulation were passed on to him during a seance by a doctor who had died a half century before.
Palmer believed that chiropractic could be used to cure virtually all our ailments, including infections and even cancer. Worryingly, even today, there are plenty of chiropractors out there who still hold these ridiculous beliefs.
Less menacing are those who acknowledge Palmer was a charlatan, but still think that muscle and joint pain can be improved using spinal manipulations.
But even these reformed chiropractors are not harmless and can endanger the health and wellbeing of their patients.
What I find particularly unnerving is the way that almost all chiropractors disregard medical ethics on a daily basis.
In medicine, there is an important concept known as informed consent. This means that patients need to be fully informed of the nature and risks of any treatment they undertake as well as the chances of it being effective.
In the case of spinal manipulations, this means patients should be told that the therapy is unlikely to work for their condition. Moreover, they should be informed that spinal manipulations often lead to minor injuries and, in some cases, can lead to life-threatening complications or deaths.
However, chiropractors rarely provide their patients with this information. It’s easy to see why. If they did, they’d likely scare away the majority of their customers.
This would significantly reduce their income which also means that chiropractors have a massive conflict of interest.
Having said all of this, I do not judge patients for seeking out chiropractors.
Around a third of Britons live with chronic pain. Half of these sufferers have back pain – which is notoriously difficult to treat.
It’s no surprise that, with so many living in agony, people are drawn to alleged quick-fix solutions like chiropractic.
Yet, the truth is that preventing or combatting pain can involve a lot of hard work on the part of the patient.
Regular exercise, losing weight, changing to a firmer mattress, and avoiding lifting heavy things may all be ways of preventing back pain, for example.
Many patients will also benefit from sessions with a physiotherapist who usually teach exercises designed to reduce pain and improve mobility in the affected area.
Chiropractors are almost never the answer to your problems. Often, they will just create new – sometimes life-threatening – ones.
As told to Ethan Ennals
