A Sacred Trust, Guard It Well
When BJ Palmer developed his father’s discovery into a health care discipline that was separate and distinct from the allopathic model, he did so with the knowledge that treating symptoms rather than cause was misguided. He taught that the logic of diagnosing and labeling symptoms as diseases and treating with chemicals and surgery was flawed. He maintained that finding the true cause of infirmity and reversing the cause was the only true path to health.
He fought to develop a separate and distinct health care system based on addressing the cause of disease rather than treating the symptoms. Considering the period in American history when this was achieved, he accomplished the impossible. He took on organized medicine and the fledgling pharmaceutical industry and offered an alternative. He fought to maintain the integrity of chiropractic from both inside and outside the profession. As a result, chiropractic still exists today as a separate and distinct health care profession..
Chiropractic is not complimentary. It is diametrically opposed to the allopathic model. It is the only true alternative to the drugs, radiation and surgery model of modern industrialized medicine. And an overwhelming body of evidence has proven that BJ Palmer and the chiropractors that followed were correct in their condemnation of this allopathic model and justified in the extreme measures taken to keep the profession separate and distinct.
The Wisdom behind the Model
The basic tenet of chiropractic was that nerve interference disrupts the normal function of the innate intelligence within the body and unless this interference was corrected, normal healthy function could not take place.
This radical view was the cornerstone of chiropractic and it had the profound impact of encouraging chiropractors to reject the prevailing allopathic medical view that man could control the innate intelligence of the body through chemical/surgical intervention. Chiropractic held that the body has this innate ability to adapt, self regulate and heal, which when given the proper environment would produce healthy tissue cells and in turn, a healthy person. BJ Palmer understood that the human body, properly maintained would provide a lifetime of health. We now know that other factors impact the function of the end organ, the tissue cell, beyond the nerve system alone.
What We Know Now
We know that nutrition is a key factor in proper cell function. We now that environmental toxins introduced into the body from drugs, pollution, chemical food additives and other sources negatively affect cell function. We know that one’s emotional state affects cell function. And we know that all disease is a result of improper cell function. Since the brain regulates and controls most cellular function in the body through the nerve system, we can form a more modern tenet of chiropractic which is congruent with the current body of knowledge. That is: Nerve interference is a possible causal factor in all disease.
It turns out that health is no more mysterious than maintaining your car. Regular maintenance (exercise and chiropractic care) combined with proper fuel (a healthy diet of natural foods and clean pure water) along with additives when needed like coolant and brake fluid (whole food nutritional supplements) and avoiding environmental contaminants such as dirt clogging your air filter or foreign matter in your gas tank (avoiding drugs, chemical food additives, toxins in air, water, etc.) results in a lifetime of useful service. It really is that simple.
One chiropractic leader recently put it this way: Regular low cost, low risk interventions such as regular exercise, proper nutrition, chiropractic care to keep your nerve system functioning properly and stress reduction (applied consistently throughout life) allows you to avoid high risk interventions such as drugs, radiation and surgery, except in emergencies.
The Toxic Lie
Yet somehow the majority of Americans have been convinced by “scientific experts” that health is a great mystery and we need highly trained scientists to dictate to us, using ever more elaborate tests and evaluations, what the body needs. And what we need are chemicals. And we need them in ever larger quantities for an ever growing list of labeled diseases like: ADD, ADHD, Restless Leg Syndrome, Osteopenia, Erectile Dysfunction, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Peripheral Artery Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, Fybromyalgia, Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, etc.
And these are just the advanced cases. We need cold remedies, cough medicines, pain relievers, antacids, cholesterol lowering drugs, blood pressure medications and the like to survive between doctor visits for these other, more serious “conditions”.
The public has become convinced that they need doctors and chemists to develop and refine these chemicals and adjust the dosage. And they now need ever more expensive health insurance to pay for these chemicals and the experts that dispense and monitor them.
This is a lie, a very toxic lie. BJ Palmer left a great legacy. His legacy is an organized, licensed body of health care providers that do not rely on chemical intervention. Those that sought his wisdom, adopted his teachings and held his skepticism of organized medicine are now in a unique position to change the world, more specifically to save the world. To save us from the madness of the pharmaceutical fantasy, to save us from bankrupting our people at the hands of the robber barons of modern medicine and health insurance who are medicating the human species into oblivion through disease mongering and fear tactics.
But we need the help and support OF and to offer reciprocal help and support TO those that are championing the other requisite components of the aforementioned recipe for avoiding high risk interventions. We cannot do it alone. Chiropractic care alone is not a health care solution. It only becomes a health care solution when it is combined with education on how the body functions and honest, accurate, non-prescriptive information on the other components necessary to regain and maintain health.
The Opportunity
Chiropractic needs to combine and align to grow and prosper, to combine adjustments with information regarding the other facets of the chiropractic lifestyle that promote health. We must align our messaging with others that share our view. And there are many who now share our view. We must combine our power with others in the profession who share our passion. Align our power with the power of others outside the profession who share our vision and stand in opposition to the allopathic model.
The list of groups that have a philosophy that is congruent with chiropractic is long and prosperous:
The natural/organic food industry
The whole food supplement industry
The exercise industry
The personal development industry
The ergonomic products industry
The environmentally friendly products industry
All organized religious and spiritual practitioners
All meditation practices including TM, Yoga, Qi Gong, etc.
Along with a growing number of organizations which exist to expose the harm being inflicted by the food and pharmaceutical industries and the corruption of the FDA that is charged with protecting consumers.
There exists an opportunity to serve as a very valuable ally to those with health promoting products or messages. The position of trusted health care provider carries considerable appeal, particularly in today’s fast paced, and media saturated economy.
The average consumer is bombarded with nearly 3000 commercial messages a day. The appeal of having a message conveyed or supported by a trusted, licensed health professional (or their staff) is invaluable, in order to have it stand out in the crowd. If that message is one that is of value to you and your practice members, by assisting in its dissemination, you are helping your practice members achieve health, elevating the importance you play in their lives and increasing the likelihood they will fully experience the benefits of your service and be more likely to stay and refer. Help others spread their message of health and they in turn can help spread the chiropractic message.
We don’t have to become mattress salesmen or vitamin distributors. But we do need to cooperate with these other industries for the common good of those we serve.
Let’s Change the World, One Spine at a Time
So here we are, with more momentum than has ever existed to support the principle and philosophy that is chiropractic. It is time to combine and align. The chiropractic lifestyle is health. It is life fully expressed. Tell the story effectively and you will never want for more practice members again. Help those that support health to tell their story and you will never want for more practice members again. Give your practice members the gift of health and the gift of life and you will never want for more practice members again. You have been empowered with a great legacy and a destiny as yet unfulfilled. You have the power to change the world and impact the future of mankind. Use it wisely for you and humanity
Golden Opportunity for Chiropractic : Fraud and Scandal Surrounding Central Nerve System Depressants
Tuesday’s bombshell that a key researcher involved in the Neurontin and Lyrica research faked the study results and invented patients takes the fraud and deception surrounding these drugs to a whole new level. This comes as new reports continue to surface about alleged fake medical articles Pfizer planted to sell the earlier half of this dynamic duo of central nerve system depressants, Neurontin, for unapproved uses from 1995 to 2002.
But it doesn’t seem to be slowing down the marketing machine promoting these new chemicals, which work by shutting down nerve system function. Remember, the pharmaceutical answer to nerve interference is to chemically shut down the messenger network.
Pfizer gave nonprofits $2.1 million in grants in 2008 for medical courses about the pain-and-fatigue ailment fibromyalgia for which its Neurontin follow-up pill, Lyrica, just happens to be approved.
Lyrica (pregablin), affectionately called Son of Neurontin at Pfizer, was discovered by Northwestern University chemist Richard Silverman in 1989, earning the university a cool $700 million when it sold royalties in late 2007.
Pfizer is funding the $100 million Richard and Barbara Silverman Hall for Molecular Therapeutics & Diagnostics, under construction now, which will employ 245 faculty, staff and research assistants.
Like Neurontin (gabapentin), Lyrica (Pregablin) is an anti-epilepsy drug (AED) that modulates calcium channels to dampen the excitability of nerve endings. And, like Neurontin which made $3 billion a year from unapproved uses like pain, bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder and restless legs syndrome, Pfizer has high hopes for Lyrica’s “crossover appeal.”
Lyrica was approved in 2006 for partial onset seizures and nerve pain associated with diabetes and shingles. But the FDA’s approval of Lyrica as the first drug for fibromyalgia in 2007 is what kicked sales up 37 percent in the third quarter to $465 million.
Fibromyalgia, with no clear cause, blood test, definition or cure “is almost a textbook definition of an unmet medical need,” enthused Pfizer VP Ian Read in a conference call to analysts when the drug first launched.
Datamonitor predicts the fibromyalgia market can be “grown” from $400 million to $2 billion thanks to all the people who do not know they have it yet.
And even before the name Lyrica appeared, Pfizer’s initial “unbranded” campaign of public service announcements (PSAs) in conjunction with the National Fibromyalgia Association that featured people describing their symptoms and hawking the web site www.fibrohope.org laid the groundwork for massive sales of Lyrica, once FDA approved.
(Think Merck’s “unbranded” HPV awareness campaign that preceded the vaccine Gardasil’s FDA approval)
Despite a temporary Lyrica scare in 2001 when Pfizer had to freeze patient trials because mice developed cancerous tumors–luckily for Pfizer, rats did not-Lyrica was well received by the “medical community”.
Except the “medical community” was made up of Pfizer paid mouthpieces.
“Well tolerated,” said Pfizer paid doctors in Arthritis and Rheumatism in 2005.
“Proven efficacy” and “No new adverse events,” said Pfizer paid doctors in Drugs of Today in 2005 and 2007.
And, “Durability of effect for relieving FM pain,” said Pfizer paid doctors in the journal Pain in 2008.
Actual Lyrica users were less overenthusiastic, reporting memory loss, mental confusion, extreme weight gain, hair loss, impaired driving, disorientation, twitching and even two deaths reported on the website askapatient.com. The FDA added suicide warnings to Lyrica and all AEDs in 2008.
Pfizer and other drug manufactures will be ratcheting up the “patient education” and awareness campaigns for fibromyalgia. But in doing so, they have been forced to admit that a primary causal factor in these symptoms is nerve interference. Otherwise, there would be no justification for prescribing nerve system depressants as a treatment for said symptoms.
As chiropractors, it is our duty to inform the public that there is an alternative to treating nerve interference with a drug that causes all of the above side effects including an increased likelihood of suicide.
As a chiropractor, you know that chemically suppressing nerve system function cannot possibly be wise. The drug does not selectively shut down only nerves transmitting pain signals. It depresses all nerve function to all tissue cells: brain, heart, lungs, kidneys, etc. These chemicals have the exact opposite objective as the chiropractic adjustment. Just imagine what the long term effects of these drugs will be. They effectively create a chemical subluxation of the entire nerve system.
The fact that the drug was possibly approved based on faked research and promoted via fake articles in medical journals presents a unique opportunity for the chiropractic community. We must take full advantage of the awareness campaigns for the “unmet medical need” Pfizer VP Ian Read is so excited about. But instead of a suicide inducing chemical, we offer life enhancing subluxation correction with the only side effect: clinically proven increased quality of life.
Of course, this can only be accomplished with a unified effort, chiropractors working together and pooling their resources to get the message out there. This is exactly the type of opportunity Chiropractic America’s YourSpine.com initiative was designed to capitalize on. Do your part by becoming a member today!
Key Researcher Advocating Lyrica and Neurontin for Pain Allegedly Faked Studies, Invented Patients
A widely known Massachusetts anesthesiologist whose research has widely influenced how doctors treat surgery patients for pain has been accused of fabricating results in at least 21 published studies and, in some cases, even inventing patients.
Physicians and journal editors said the allegations, if proven, could constitute one of the largest and longest-running cases ever of medical research fraud.
Dr. Scott S. Reuben, who works at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, has published dozens of articles on “multimodal analgesia,” an important and emerging area of anesthesiology involving use of more than one type of drug to relieve post-surgical pain and foster faster recovery.
Last May, during a routine review of research summaries that were to be presented at the hospital’s research week, physicians discovered that the research Reuben intended to present had not been approved by an internal hospital review board that oversees research on patients, Dr. Hal Jenson, Baystate’s chief academic officer, said yesterday.
That discovery led to a full-scale investigation by the hospital, which was completed in January. The investigation uncovered 21 published papers over 13 years in which Reuben made up some or all of the data, Jenson said.
Jenson said that in many cases “there was no clinical trial because there were no patients.”
The hospital notified several medical journals about the results of its investigation, and the journals are in the process of retracting Reuben’s papers, said Jenson.
“This would be the largest research fraud in anesthesia,” said Dr. Steven Shafer, editor of the journal Anesthesia and Analgesia. “Doctors have been using [his] findings very widely. His findings had a huge impact on the field. The act of fabricating data is so difficult for me to comprehend. It’s beyond my ability to imagine.”
Dr. Greg Koski, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and former director of the federal Office for Human Research Protections, said the case is unusual, not because of the number of journal articles involved, but because of the number of years the deception is alleged to have gone on.
“That’s what makes this so remarkable,” he said. “. . It seems to have gone on for so long without being detected by the peer review process. It’s hard to fake something for that long. Pain research is not an obscure area; people look at it all the time.”
Celebex, Lyrica and Neurontin Research Part of the Fraud
In some instances, the studies in question involved data about drugs made by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc., including Celebrex, Lyrica, and Neurontin. The company gave Reuben five research grants between 2002 and 2007, and he was a member of Pfizer’s speakers bureau, in which physicians give talks about Pfizer drugs to colleagues.
In response to the news of this fraud, Pfizer spokeswoman Sally Beatty said the clinical trials that led the US Food and Drug Administration to approve Celebrex and Lyrica for pain did not include Reuben’s research. Celebrex was approved to treat acute pain, including that following surgery, in 2001. Lyrica is not approved for the treatment of acute pain, but doctors can use the drug for that purpose “off-label.” The company’s statement did not address Neurontin.
*It should be noted in the above quote from Pfizer spokeswoman Beatty that it is illegal for a drug company to suggest off-label use of the drug for pain as Beatty does above.
“It is very disappointing to learn about Dr. Scott Reuben’s alleged actions,” Pfizer said in a statement, adding that the company was “not involved in the conduct of any of these independent studies or in the interpretation or publication of the study results.”
The fraud allegations were first reported this week by Anesthesiology News.
Although Reuben often co-wrote papers with other researchers, Jenson said Baystate found that the other researchers did not know about or participate in the alleged fabrications.
In a Feb. 20 letter to readers posted online, Shafer said his journal will publish formal retractions of Reuben’s studies published in Anesthesia and Analgesia in May.
Anesthesiologists agreed there will be an impact on the field, but disagreed over how significant it would be.
Dr. James Rathmell, chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital pain clinic, said the effect is unknown.
“Reuben’s idea of adding Lyrica and Neurontin to the mix.”
“He had some important findings that were very encouraging to all of us,” he said. But, he said, many other researchers have published positive results for Celebrex and other Cox-2 inhibitors for treatment of surgical pain. More in question, he said, is Reuben’s idea of adding Lyrica and Neurontin to the mix. “He’s done the few studies in that area,” Rathmell said.
Shafer, however, said researchers and physicians are going to reexamine the literature and may have to repeat clinical trials. “We have to be open to the possibility there was patient injury,” he said, despite the relative safety of the drugs in question. “Nothing is without risk.”
Drugs Prescribed for Subluxations Cause Suicide
A Senate inquiry found that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “isn’t keeping track of how drugs are marketed for off-label use, even though marketing for off-label use is illegal and it’s the FDA’s job to enforce that law,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa said in a statement. “As a result, drug makers aren’t being held accountable for promoting unapproved use of medicine and patient safety is diminished.”
The report from the Government Accountability Office delves into a gray area of medical practice and federal oversight: the use of medications to treat conditions other than the ones the drugs were approved for, a practice known as “off-label” prescribing. The Wall Street Journal reports that studies have found off-label use accounted for 40% to 50% of all prescriptions.
Drug companies are forbidden to promote medications for uses that have not been validated by the FDA on evidence from clinical trials. Doctors, however, can use independent judgment in prescribing medicines. Also, under guidance proposed by the FDA this year, drug companies could distribute to doctors “scientific articles” that suggest new and unapproved uses for medications
The review that Grassley requested by the investigative arm of Congress found that the FDA is ill-equipped to catch even blatant marketing abuses by drug companies. The agency does not have any staff exclusively assigned to monitor whether companies are following the rule against marketing drugs for unapproved uses. Although widely accepted, off-label prescribing can amount to an uncontrolled experiment. Many people have been harmed by unexpected side effects.
The study found that it takes FDA an average of seven months to issue a warning, according to a draft report by congressional investigators. It typically takes four more months for the company to fix the problem. During the ensuing 11 months, a lot of prescriptions can be written.
From 2003-2007, the office issued only 42 notices of possible violations, which usually (but not always) prompted the drug maker to drop its promotional claims.
Why does this matter to me as a chiropractor? One word: Neurontin.
Neurontin is a controversial anti-seizure drug approved for epilepsy, which was widely and illegally promoted by Pfizer for pain. Pfizer also illegally promoted the drug for bi-polar disorder and anxiety disorder.
In 2004, Pfizer pleaded guilty to criminal fraud in the promotion of Neurontin, and agreed to pay $430 million. Neurontin was approved for limited use as a supplemental anti-seizure treatment for epilepsy, but was promoted by Lambert-Warner (now Pfizer) and a consortium of paid physicians who promoted and prescribed the drug for everything from ADHD, mental illnesses to a variety of pain conditions, including migraine headaches. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2004: “use of Neurontin for unapproved uses – estimated to account for 90% of the $2.7 billion in sales last year – continues to rise despite stepped up prosecutorial efforts aimed at curbing the practice. At the same time, studies show that much of the unapproved use of Neurontin isn’t even effective.”
The commercially successful marketing “miracle” of Neurontin was achieved through a collaborative effort of the company and leading physicians who were given financial incentives to encourage their colleagues–under the pretext of providing “continuing medical education”–to prescribe a largely ineffective drug for unapproved, diverse and unrelated conditions. Essentially physicians were “educated” to use their prescribing license to increase profits rather than to improve their patients’ health.
Neurontin and its successor Lyrica work by depressing the central nerve system. They are widely prescribed for “neuropathy”, “peripheral neuropathy” or “nerve pain”. The pharmaceutical answer to the subluxation is as follows: if there is a problem with the signals being transmitted over the nerve system, chemically shut down the transmission network.
The marketing for these chemicals include statements such as: “Peripheral Neuropathy is one of the most common diseases most people have never heard of…and yet, upwards of 20 million Americans have it. Peripheral neuropathy is caused by damage to your body’s peripheral nerves. This damage disrupts the body’s ability to communicate with its muscles, skin, joints, or internal organs. It is like the body’s wiring system breaking down.” They go on to explain that the nerve interference can be caused by: “compression, drugs and toxins, or of unknown psychological causes”.
Sound familiar to anyone? Improper communication between the brain and the muscles, skin, joints, or internal organs caused by physical, chemical or emotional stressors.
Drugs that chemically shut down the nerve system are raking in billions of dollars for drug companies who are promoting them as the only solution for “neuropathy”, which literally means “changes in the pathology of the nerve”. But wait, it gets worse.
Neurontin has been documented to cause potential side effects of depression, aggression and suicide. There are currently over 100 lawsuits pending in federal court from suicides that are allegedly tied to Neurontin. A researcher involved in the clinical trials that preceded Neurontin’s approval testified last month that the company was aware of the side effects as early as 1995.
In June 2008, the FDA officially announced that Neurontin, Lyrica and nine other epilepsy drugs are associated with a higher risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior. They are working, as you read this, on requiring that patients finally be warned of the associated risks with a “black box” warning, the FDA’s strongest safety notice.
In the mean time, millions of unsuspecting consumers are taking these potentially lethal chemicals to treat “nerve interference” causing back pain, neck pain, headaches or any other nerve related pain.
One more thing, Lyrica is the world’s first drug ever approved by the FDA to treat fibromyalgia. The time is now to stand up and have your voice heard. If you don’t do it, who will?
Google’s Matt Cutts Cites Chiropractic Example
In a recent USA Today interview Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues, gave his top 5 easy tips on how to “optimize” your site so Google and the rest of the world can find it.
Matt gives an example of a San Diego chiropractor who lamented that his site was not listed at the top of the Google search engine results. A quick peek at the site revealed that nowhere on the site was the term “San Diego Chiropractor” spelled out.
This would seem like an obvious oversight, until you consider that even after deducing what word or phrase (AKA search term) Internet users will be searching on to find you, you must then decide how many times to repeat the search term on the page, whether to include the term in the “title tag”, in what order, and at what “density”. Should they be repeated in the “H1″ and “H2″ tags as well?
Once that has been worked out, go out and get some high quality “backlinks”, create a “blog” for your practice, get some traffic to your blog, hopefully resulting in some additional incoming links. Create interesting and fresh “content” for your blog and employ the latest strategies to get your blog found.
Next, go out and begin to “bookmark” your site on some popular social media sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon. Participate in the the discussion, get to know the etiquette necessary to successfully engage in these social media communities and you should, in time, have some limited success.
You are now ready to develop an “XML sitemap” for your site. If you create a search engine friendly “URL” structure, hopefully in a neat “silo structure”, factor in some “latent semantic indexing” terms that are appropriate for your site, and voila, your site will be found, indexed, and if you are really lucky, you may appear in the top 50 or so results of the current 283,000 results Google has indexed for the term “San Diego Chiropractor”. Change the search to “Chiropractor San Diego” and Google has 460,000 results indexed.
Now if all this is Greek to you, rest assured you are not alone. The fact is, trying to get an individual practice website to appear at the top of the search engines is a daunting, if not impossible task.
In fact, one of the largest Chiropractor web site companies in the country sent out an email very recently that stated ” we had neglected the whole search engine thing”. He went on to exclaim, after several years of charging nearly one thousand doctors a monthly fee for chiropractic websites, “We need to figure out this search engine thing”. This self inspection occurred only after being berated by a potential customer.
If the president of a company that has collected millions of dollars from chiropractors for web site services had to be taunted into investigating how this stuff works, should you feel bad if you need an Internet to English dictionary to make sense of all of this?
You are, after all a chiropractor, not a web site developer. And at the end of the day, having a top placement for a term such as San Diego chiropractor doesn’t mean much these days anyway.
Why? Because the “local” search results now appear over top of the “natural” search results for searches that contain a city name. So all of the aforementioned work and effort still will not put your practice information in front of consumers, at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).
And even if you could achieve top placement in your town for a term like “San Diego chiropractor”, this still only reaches the 5% of the population that are already looking for a chiropractor. This does nothing to reach the 10 million Americans who are searching the Internet for health information each and every day. They have no idea that chiropractic care can help them.
Do yourself a favor. Join together with the thousands of other chiropractors who had decided to let the computer geeks handle this web stuff and stick to making sick people well.
Together, we have developed a comprehensive program to not only put you in front of the Americans that regularly seek chiropractic care, but also put positive, accurate information about chiropractic in the hands of all Americans that can benefit from your care. And we reach them at the exact moment they are deciding what form that care should take.
You owe it to yourself to check out what is possible, by working together, rather than against one another. There is great power in numbers. Power to change the world. Get on board with other like minded chiropractors. Get involved with something big.
Let us worry about the complexities of search engine placement, local search optimization, keyword density, title tags, heading tags, blog posts, content creation, optimization, directory structure, etc, etc.
Do what you do best: improve the quality of life of your practice members. Let us handle getting them in the door.