frosted Wrote:
I've been to an excellent chiropractor. And acupunturist. Both also happen to be genuine medical-like doctors, as well.
You're quite right that chiropractors are "medical-like doctors". They do their best to be "like" doctors. But they're not doctors. They aren't required to hold a doctorate, and neither are they required to hold the degree of a general practitioner. They don't possess the training of a real doctor, which is partly what makes them so dangerous.
Contrast that to physiotherapists, who hold the same undergraduate degree as medical doctors, and yet they STILL don't refer to themselves as doctors.
Chiropractic was invented by Canadian Daniel David Palmer. He was the kind of dude who, like L. Ron Hubbard, believed he was a prophet - and he was obsessed with finding "nature's Great Secret" - the single cure for all disease.
At first he dabbled in magnetic healing. Practitioners of magnetic healing believed that their personal magnetism was so great that it gave them the power to cure disease. But then, after 9 years as a magnetic healer, he made his "discovery":
In his book At Your Own Risk; The Case Against Chiropractic, Ralph Lee Smith Wrote:
On the block where his offices were located, Palmer says, there worked a janitor named Harvey Lillard who had been deaf for seventeen years. Palmer made inquiry and found that "when he [Lillard] was exerting himself in a cramped, stooping position, he felt something give way in his back and immediately became deaf."
Palmer examined Lillard and found a subluxated (misaligned) vertebra in his spine. "I reasoned that if that vertebra was replaced," said Palmer, "the man's hearing should be restored. With this object in view, a half-hour's talk persuaded Mr. Lillard to allow me to replace it."
Palmer laid Lillard down on his stomach on an examining couch, and applied a firm pressure to the vertebra with his hands. The vertebra moved back into place, "and soon the man could hear as before."
Magnetic healer Palmer could hardly be expected to know that the nerves of hearing are self-contained in the head and do not reach the spine. And the reader is entitled to wonder how Palmer discussed Lillard's problem with him for a half hour while Lillard was deaf. But Palmer believed that he was on the track of the Great Secret.
"Shortly after this relief from deafness, I had a case of heart trouble which was not improving. I examined the spine and found a displaced vertebra pressing against the nerves which innervate the heart. I adjusted the vertebra and gave immediate relief. . . "
"Then I began to reason," he continued, "if two diseases, so dissimilar as deafness and heart trouble, came from impingement, a pressure on nerves, were not other disease [sic] due to a similar cause?"
That was all the proof Palmer needed. All disease was caused by nerves that are pinched by a misaligned spine. The cure consists in applying manual pressure on the misaligned vertebrae and forcing them back into place. That was the beginning of chiropractic.
Of course, chiropractors have adapted with the times. Most of the theories their "science" was based on have been inarguably disproved through modern medical advancements. These days their methods are getting closer and closer to physiotherapy. But they still believe in the manipulation of the spine, which can obviously do more harm than good.
Also, have you ever noticed how the people who go to chiropractors never get cured? They end up going back for "adjustments" for the rest of their lives. So it's not just quackery, it's a cash grab.
Those get me every time. 
