Survival Arts

I saw the "psychics" expose tonight (I'd recorded it last night), and must say that I really like P&T's approach. The mediums are scum, for the way they use grieving relatives.

I think some of you are under the (to me, flattering) misapprehension that this is Penn & Teller's personal website. It isn't, and I don't represent them. I don't even know if they read this blog.

Please change your mode of address from 2nd person to 3rd person.

Though I have been entertained by Penn and Teller for year, I have to say that their new series "Bullshit" is merely sensationalized entertainment and does not show the balanced objective research based approach required to offer anything more than edgy opinionated entertainment. The ideal viewer for this program would be a Homer Simpson or perhaps an Al Bundy type. Hopefully the average viewer is more complex and realize many of these issues require one to have both an analytic and an open mind. From what I've seen so far they have given a very superficial treatment to their topics.
I have to admit I was actually angered by the warped presentation of chiropractic. When I was young and dumb I used to think chiropractic was some wacky new aged strangeness (thanks to the slanted media presentation) but chiropractic care has helped me and every member of my family. Chiropractic is philosophically sound and continues to produce supporting research (unfortunately, they don’t have the funding of billion dollar pharmaceutical companies or even support from the federal government) I find it hard to believe someone would go to the trouble of getting a four year undergraduate degree(usually in biology), complete the pre-med/chiropractic classes (college biology 1 and 2, Physics 1 and 2, Chemistry 1 and 2, and Organic Chemistry 1 and 2)and then spend the next 4 years in a rigorous doctoral program complete with 4 national board examinations and often a 5th state board exam just to scam the public. There are much easier paths for the disingenuous to travel. (for example some people who wish to deceive the public become magicians.) Chiropractors, for the most part, are people who are well educated and know there is a better approach to health care than drugs and surgery.
Most of us would agree that preventative health care makes sense for your teeth but for some reason people don’t understand the importance of their spine and the nervous system it protects. The spine suffers biomechanical instabilities from trauma and over time through daily activity wear and tear. These instabilities cause local fixation and limit motion between vertebrae. This fixation/loss of normal motion causes degeneration in the spine, just as a cast over a broken arm causes the muscles and bones to weaken and atrophy. Have you ever seen the x-rays of a 60 year old who played football in high school or college? It is not a pretty sight and the damage has occurred over time due to fixation from scar tissue which leads to loss of bone mass and atrophy of the inter-vertebral disc. Restoring motion to these segments at an early stage is essential to prevent degeneration. The guy who listens to Penn and Teller will end-up as a stiff, sore, hunched over not so old man. Note the fact that the nerves that form the communication link from your brain to the rest of your body and vice versa leave the spine through spaces between the vertebrae and a whole new possible threat to your overall health becomes quite obvious.
Chiropractors are not quacks, they are doctors who truly yearn to educate and care for the members of their community. To attempt to discredit their efforts so basely is a shameful act. It not only harms a noble profession but it harms the people who could live healthier lives if they were not falsely dissuaded from care. Here is an interesting point of fact I'd like to share. Medical doctors, Osteopaths and Physical Therapists have encroached on the chiropractor's licensed scope of practice and have begun to perform spinal manipulations themselves. The training they receive in manipulation is typically no more than a ten day seminar. Who’s quacking now? Should chiropractors file suit against medical doctors for practicing chiropractic without a license?
Here's a response letter from the president of the American Chiropractic Association
www.amerchiro.org/media/record/showtime.shtml

Dear Richard Soukup, chiropractors are dangerous quacks and lunatics.

Please see http://www.quackwatch.org

Chriopractors have ripped me off and made my back worse. I don't even know where to start. I was sucked in to pay for a program...I was desperate and in pain. I paid heaps of money and went for a ayear. The pain got worse and worse and they kept telling me if was something I was doing and 'it feels worse because it is healing'. Recently after an ajustment I could hardly walk and wanted to die and I am a 27 year old female who is normally fit and healthy. I am also very petite and my chiro was always rough, jerking me around without warming the muscles. Both a DR., massage therapist and my firend who is a physio all agreed that they chiro had done lots of damage. I have not gone for three weeks and already the pain is decreasing-but not the pain to my pocket book. I am angry and ashamed I got sucked in. They took advantage of someone who could not afford it.

> The ideal viewer for this program would
> be a Homer Simpson or perhaps an Al
> Bundy type. Hopefully the average viewer
> is more complex...

Sorry. The average TV watcher in the US (like the average voter) is very much on an intellectual par with Homer and Al.

Andrea, I am sorry to hear of your unsatisfactory experience with Chiropractic. The care you describe sounds like a care plan intended to correct abnormal curves in your spine. Like working-out at the gym, reconstructive care plans may cause discomfort as your body moves out of an unhealthy pattern (shortened muscles and ligaments becomes stretched, lengthened muscles and ligaments must shorten, bones actually reshape as the forces of normal activity stress the spine differently, etc.) Did your Doctor prescribe posture correcting exercises and employ the use of cervical extension traction? These elements should have been a part of your care plan. Your Doctor should have performed periodic examinations to evaluate your progress and indicate any changes to the care that was being provided. If your condition did not show improvement your Doctor should have altered your care plan or sent you to another provider. Techniques that may be more gentle, and in your case, more effective include Thompson drop or Activator. There is a possibility that your Doctor did not approach your case correctly. Every profession has it share of less than perfect practitioners and less than successful cases.
Remember, pain is an indicator of a change which is not always bad. Pain is also not the best indicator of a problem. One can have serious health issues and not notice any symptoms until extensive damage has already been done. Now that you have had a bad experience with a chiropractor you should seek out a good one. Don't let a bad experience rob you of the benefits chiropractic has to offer you.

P.S. As for Quackwatch, I am well aware this site and the Chirobase site. There is a lot of history behind the medical profession's aversion to chiropractic. In fact, the AMA was found guilt by the Supreme Court of illegally conspiring to baselessly slander and destroy the Chiropractic profession. (Some say competition and a decline in the use of lucrative medications was the motivation, others say blind professional conceit. I think it was born from well meaning but narrow minded view of health care). The medical approach has always had a pain and symptom based approach to health care (aka. Sick Care). This approach is like the Cartesian clock model. If a clock has a cog that has worn and the clock fails to work the answer is to replace the cog and move on. This approach sees the human body as a machine and not a living organism. This same approach has been the standard for dealing with our environment up until the last couple of decades. We now know that our ecosphere is a living collection of interdependent systems. Any change in one system will result in changes through out the system. Chiropractic has approached the human body as a whole, self regulating, and self healing entity. Spinal vertebrae which are misaligned with each other cause the body to mal-function both bio-mechanically and neurologically.
Chirobase featured an artical which claimed Chiropractors didn't have a full understanding of the nervous system because they claimed subluxation altered the electrical signals sent through spinal nerves. There argument was that nerves are not electrical but hormonal in nature (focusing on the fact that neurotransmitters are sent into the gaps between nerves to evoke nerve action potentials.) The fact is our nervous systems are chemoelectrical. Charged ions inside and outside the nerve cell work together in specific ratios to conduct an ionic charge (electrical). After this charge is evoked and transmitted through a nerve cell neurotransmitters send a signal to a communicating nerve cell and if enough reaches the cell it will depolerize and continue the signal to whatever the nerve innervates. Research has shown that no more than the pressure exerted by the weight of a dime is enough to alter the firing rate (function) of a nerve. With that said how many of you want to hear your Doctor go into that kind of detail??? There fore, Chiropractors try to simplify matters when explaining things to patients (as Medical Doctors do). Perhaps Chirobase needs to get a hold of a current neurophysiology textbook. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist)
I'm sure these sites (for the most part) have the consumer’s best interests at heart, but from what I've read most of the chiropractic related information is a misguided dis-service.
When two very different paradigms clash confusion usually dominates. We are like blind men groping at two ends of a horse. One describes the features of the tail and the other the snout. Neither is wrong but neither of the two agree. If I, feeling the snout, assert my own perceptions and reject the other's because they differ from mine, I damn myself to ignorance and will never learn the truth of the whole.

So apparently this Richard Soukup guy is a chiropractor? Andrea- you were right to stay away from your chiropractor. They are all quacks- manipulating a joint using a grade V thrust (something all chiros do- irregardless if the area requires it or not) more than once leads to laxity in the ligaments, degenerative changes in the bone, and instability. It's a shame that Richard thinks so highly of his profession- the students in chiro "schools" are brainwashed into thinking they can cure acne, PMS, and asthma by cracking a person's back. While I am writing this, I also want to tell all chiros reading this to lay off the x-rays! 1-3 x-ray per week to a patient is more radiation than the body can handle! But I see... you are trying to give them cancer so you can heal the cancer, right? Because I remember that one being on your list, too. Sheesh!

STAY AWAY FROM THESE PEOPLE!!! I went to a chiropractor with minor lower back pain after I started my new job. This guy wanted to schedule me for months and talked and talked about how I needed repeated adjustments. Well, I decided to get a second opinion from an MD before I shelled out my hard earned cash - and guess what? After a week - no more pain. I thought - hmmm, that's weird, maybe it will come back. It didn't. If I had listened I would have been out hundreds of dollars, maybe more. And the good "doctor" would have had a nice car payment in his pocket.

Funny, I just read the letter from the ACA. And it said exactly what P&T said on their show: Chiropractic can be helpful for muscle and back pain. It just won't cure eczema, which is what the Chiropractor they were interviewing was claiming.

In other words, the ACA expressed dismay that P&T claimed that some chiropractors make extravagant and unsupported claims, citing studies that showed what P&T had stipulated was true about Chiropracty.

score? Bullshit 1, ACA 0.

Chiropractic..........
Medicine........
Drug Therapy........

Why does my Chiroprcator put me on a plan???

Why do docotors give me antibiotics (anti BACTERIAL) when I have a Virus like a cold??

Why do Drug companies advertise to the Public??

Why do drug companies pay for a Doctor's lunch??

WHy don't chiroprcatic and Medicine Get Along??

Why dont Chiropractor prescribe drugs???

Why don't Doctors prescribe nutrition??

Chiropractic..........
Medicine........
Drug Therapy........

Why does my Chiroprcator put me on a plan???

Why do docotors give me antibiotics (anti BACTERIAL) when I have a Virus like a cold??

Why do Drug companies advertise to the Public??

Why do drug companies pay for a Doctor's lunch??

WHy don't chiroprcatic and Medicine Get Along??

Why dont Chiropractor prescribe drugs???

Why don't Doctors prescribe nutrition??

The only people who don't like or claim that its not objective enough are the same people the show debunkes.
These people who practise these things always go that "Penn and Teller are not objective enough". Which is bullshit. :P Penn and Teller give interviews and give their opinum as well as opinums of SCIENTIST and HISTORIANS. These are also matters that cannot be viewed objectively, and lets admit it, human stupidity is a common practise. The problem is when people will USE OUT that stupidity.

runescape money runescape gold runescape gold runescape money buy runescape gold buy runescape money runescape money runescape gold wow power leveling wow powerleveling Warcraft Power Leveling Warcraft PowerLeveling buy runescape gold buy runescape money runescape items runescape accounts runescape gp dofus kamas buy dofus kamas Guild Wars Gold buy Guild Wars Gold lotro gold buy lotro gold lotro gold buy lotro gold lotro gold buy lotro gold runescape money runescape power leveling runescape money runescape gold dofus kamas cheap runescape money cheap runescape gold Hellgate Palladium Hellgate London Palladium Hellgate money Tabula Rasa gold tabula rasa money Tabula Rasa Credit Tabula Rasa Credits Hellgate gold Hellgate London gold wow power leveling wow powerleveling Warcraft PowerLeveling Warcraft Power Leveling World of Warcraft PowerLeveling World of Warcraft Power Leveling runescape power leveling runescape powerleveling eve isk eve online isk eve isk eve online isk tibia gold Fiesta Silver Fiesta Gold SilkRoad Gold buy SilkRoad Gold runescape accounts buy runescape accounts rs2 accounts buy rs2 accounts runescape power leveling rs2 power leveling FFXI Gil buy FFXI Gil gaia gold buy gaia gold buy dofus kamas buy dofus kamas dofus kamas runescape accounts buy runescape accounts rs2 accounts buy rs2 accounts runescape power leveling rs2 power leveling