Chiropractic and the AMA Conspiracy to Contain and Eliminate
After more than a century of institutional discrimination against blacks in the medical profession, the American Medical Association has finally admitted its role in promoting such discrimination, issuing an apology for all the harm its racist policies have caused over the years. You can read the apology on the AMA Website.
Unknown to most consumers, the American Medical Association barred physicians from becoming members of the AMA unless they were first accepted as members of local AMA chapters, yet many local AMA chapters had rules specifically barring membership of black doctors well into the 1960′s.
The medical profession has a long history of discrimination, particularly against alternative healing professions. While always claiming public safety as its reasons for the attacks, the true reasons involve protecting their monopoly of the health care market.
In the past, medicine has fought battles to limit the practices of such professionals as homeopaths, naturopaths, osteopaths, podiatrists, optometrists, dentists, psychologists and chiropractors. In the case of osteopathy and chiropractic, there are distinct differences in the approach to healing and health when compared to medicine. The last thing that organized medicine wants is for their doctrine of drugs and surgery to be challenged.
Osteopaths allowed themselves to be absorbed by medicine–today there is little difference between an M.D. and a D.O. Chiropractic on the other hand, fought hard–through the personalities of those like B.J.Palmer to remain a separate and distinct profession.
Medicines opposition to chiropractic was at its strongest under the leadership of Morris Fishbein. Fishbein as Secretary of the American Medical Association from 1924 to 1949, lead a 25 year anti-chiropractic campaign in both professional publications and the public media. Fishbein called chiropractors “rabid dogs” and referred to them as “playful and cute..but killers.” He tried to portray chiropractors as members of an unscientific cult, caring about noting but taking their patients money.
In 1949 the AMA removed Fishbein but continued its wage an anti-chiropractic campaign. In 1971, H. Doyle Taylor, the Director of the AMA Department of Investigation, and Secretary of its Committee on Quackery (COQ), submitted a memo to the AMA Board of Trustees stating:
Since the AMA Board of Trustees decision, at its meeting on November 2-3, 1963, to establish a Committee on Quackery, your Committee has considered its prime mission to be, first, the containment of chiropractic and, ultimately, the elimination of chiropractic.
The following is an excerpt from the COQ’s first annual report to the Board of the AMA:
…The Involvement (and indoctrination) of the State Medical Society leadership, in our opinion, is vital to the success of the chiropractic program…We hope and believe that, with continued aggressive AMA activity, chiropractic can and will be contained at the national level and that steps are being taken to stop or eliminate the licenser of chiropractic at the state level.
In 1967 the COQ released its anti chiropractic campaign goals:
Basically, the Committee’s short-range objectives for containing the cult of chiropractic and any additional recognition it might achieve revolves about four points:
1. Doing everything within our power to see that chiropractic coverage under title 18 of the Medicare Law is not obtained.
2. Doing everything within our power to see that the recognition or listing by the U.S. Office of Education of a chiropractic accrediting agency is not achieved.
3. To encourage contained separation of the two national chiropractic associations.
4. To encourage state medical societies to take the initiative in their state legislatures in regard to legislation that might affect the practice of chiropractic.
The AMA through its Committee on Quackery continued its war against chiropractic through such acts as, distributing propaganda to the nation’s teachers and guidance councilors, eliminating the inclusion of chiropractic from the U.S Department of Labor’s, Health Careers Guidebook, and establishing specific educational guidelines for medical schools regarding the “hazards to individuals from the unscientific cult of chiropractic.”
The AMA did not stop with these acts of propaganda against the chiropractic profession. They worked both publicly and politically to insure that chiropractic failed as a profession. But, even with all of this negative publicity against the profession, chiropractic continued to gain acceptance with the general public, because chiropractic got results.
In 1975 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Goldfarb vs. The Virginia State Bar that learned professions are not exempt form antitrust suites. In 1982 the Court ruled that the FTC can enforce antitrust laws against medical societies. These two suites paved the way in 1976 for five chiropractors to file an anti-trust suite against the AMA and several other heath care agencies and societies in Federal District Court (known as the Wilkes Case).
Similar suites were filed in New York and Pennsylvania in 1979. The pressure of these law suites forced the AMA even before these suites went to court to propose a modification of their Medical Code of Ethics which prohibited M.D.s from associating with chiropractors. But, it was not until 1980 that the Ethics Code was changed to reflect that each individual doctor may decide for themselves whether to accept a patient from or refer a patient to a chiropractor or other limited practitioner.
The law suites caused so much fear in the medical profession that Mike Wallace (of 60 minutes) was unable to find an M.D. to take the anti-chiropractic side for a 1979 documentary piece on chiropractic.
In 1980 the Wilkes suite went to court, were the AMA and other defendants were found not guilty of all charges. That decision was overturned and a new trial was ordered by the U.S. Court of Appeals in February 1983.
Judge Susan Getzendanner found the AMA and others guilty of an illegal conspiracy against the chiropractic profession in September of 1987, ordering a permeate injunction against the AMA and forcing them to print the courts findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Several other of the defendants settled out of court helping to pay for the chiropractors legal expenses and donating to a chiropractic non-profit home for disabled children, Kentuckiana Children’s Center.
This decision was upheld in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1990 and again by the U.S. Supreme Court that same year.
And what did we do with the opportunity? Instead of coming out strongly and publicly exposing the proven illegal boycott and corruption on the part of the AMA, many within the profession saw this as an opportunity to embrace the new found “permission” given to the medical doctors by the AMA to associate with chiropractors as an opportunity to integrate chiropractic into the allopathic model.
To this day, most consumers are unaware that the “idea” that chiropractors are quacks was purposefully, illegally, underhandedly, and cleverly crafted and promoted by the AMA.
While unable to eliminate chiropractic, the combination of AMA tactics and lack of unity among chiropractors and chiropractic organizations has very effectively contained chiropractic. Contained to episodic treatment of back pain, contained to musculoskeletal only care, contained to seeing only 5% of the population. The truth is chiropractic has proven itself over the last 113 plus years, to be a safe and effective means of maintaining health. Isn’t it about time to get together and let the public know who we are, what we represent and what we have to offer?
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.
Chiropractic is True Healthcare
Chiropractors have, for the past 113 years, eliminated sickness and infirmity without the use of drugs and with the goal of avoiding surgical removal or repair of any of the body’s organs or structures. Chiropractic’s message is that the proactive care of one’s body and wise lifestyle choices are necessary to achieve health. Chiropractors have held and maintained this view, even before it became fashionable and long before evidence made it clear that the drug and surgery model of “healthcare” is really nothing more than “disease care”, waiting for disease to occur and then treating the effects. Chiropractic takes a preventive approach to healthcare: eliminate the cause of disease.
Chiropractors have always maintained that interfering with the transmission of the electro-chemical signals that connect your brain, the master control system for the human organism, to every organ and cell in your body has a detrimental effect on health.
This system is so delicate and of such vital importance that the body has designed in the most elaborate set of protection, armor if you will, to protect it. The skull is a protective vault that houses and protects the most sensitive of systems: the eyes, the mouth, the ears and most importantly, the brain. The next critical organ in your body, the spinal cord, is guarded by your spine. This masterpiece of engineering is 24 vertebrae, each one a unique bone, that serves not only as the integral part of your neuromuscloskeletal system, giving you the unique ability to walk upright, but also has a unique set of nerves that run through it to every other system of the body through individual holes called foramen.
What travels through the spine and the foramen that protect them is the very essence of your being. From your brain, your spinal cord and the millions of nerves that branch out from it are the core from which your body functions. Before you came into the world, you formed a brain and a spinal cord and developed a body around it. And so it is today that the brain regulates the rest of your body through this delicate system of nerves protected by your spine.
Chiropractors maintain the proper position of these delicate joints and the precious cargo which they protect, your nerve system.
Pressure on the root nerves that leave the spine through the foramen to control and regulate all of the other organ systems of the body can affect millions of nerve fibers. Pressure on the brain stem, where it leaves the skull and enters the spine can also affect millions of nerve fibers. Interfering with these nerve fibers can have disastrous affects on your health.
Chiropractors detect and correct the cause of this interference, allowing your body to self regulate, adapt and heal. The care and maintenance of the spine and nervous system is a necessary component of any natural approach to healthcare.
Chiropractors have been outspoken opponents of water fluoridation, mass vaccination, over use of prescription drugs, food additives and have always maintained that it is better to find and correct the cause of disease, rather than merely treat or cover up symptoms.
Today, chiropractors embrace and support the growing body of evidence that health is a result of: a fully functioning nerve system, consuming natural, nutrient rich food, clean pure water, proper exercise, natural sleep and emotional/spiritual well being. A healthy spine allows your body to adapt, regulate and fully realize the benefits of all of these other natural methods of avoiding disease and achieving health. See your chiropractor today to have your spine checked and begin to extricate yourself from the disease care system of treating symptoms.