Or at least being open and honest about whether or not they can treat asthma and cholics?

“I’m sorry, Sir, I cannot at this time tell you whether my new burger sauce is toxic. Just go on eating, we’ll find out eventually.”

Great work ethics.

I think you misunderstood the thrust of the argument here. We can indeed probably all agree that most forms of medical care try to put their efforts into a broader context, and that chiropractic may have a place in treating, as you say, pain conditions. These will in turn of course also affect the person’s overall well-being.

In this limited scope, the phrases mentioned are certainly not weasel words. When, however, a chiropractic starts to extrapolate the dislocation-vs.-wellbeing logic towards treating cholics and asthma, then there is something wrong. Because then “the relationship between structure and function” is simply unproven” and the assertion that “something is used to treat” does not mean it also works.

“Knocking on wood is often used to improves chances of luck.” – Certainly true. But certainly of no effect. In marketing, those are weasel words – not outright wrong, but not applicable. Non sequiturs. Misleading. And in health, misleading someone is especially unethical.

To come back to the point: Sceptics don’t usually have much to complain about chiropractics that stick to what’s known to work. It’s when they get pseudoscientific when we get this itching in our fingers.

“Chiropractic therapy focuses on the relationship…”

“the relationship between the body’s structure and the body’s function”

“used most often to treat”

Chiropractic therapy, as does physiotherapy, focuses on the relation between structure and function. In fact as does podiatry, some orthodontic, some maxillo-facial, most orthopeadic, as in fact do pretty much all surgical procedures. That these statements sound like “weasel marketing phrases that convey no scientific or medical meaning” has a lot to do with your lack of appreciation of the statement’s meaning and significance. Zeno, I suspect that the paradigm you use and subscribe to, views structure to be more stand-alone than we do. The chiropractic paradigm looks at structure as predisposing function and function as redefining structure. Also please note at this stage that the functions we would be interested in are biomechanical, biochemical and psychological (and before you hilariously intimate that we are “now claiming to be psychotherapists or dieticians” we don’t , we just claim to have an intrest in these fields and accept that these functions interact with biomechanical function and with eachother). Appreciating these relationships and having an intimate understanding of them are key in solving the types of problems chiropractors consider to be within their remit. To intimate that chiropractors claim to cure all illnesses is just ricidulous and only serves to feed simplistic preconceptions so as to sway the debate in numbers rather than content and truth. Chiropractors treat conditions which are caused by structural damage extensive enough to cause pain but no so extensive as to not be responsive to functional changes. Yes, this indeed means that chiropractors are interested in those situations where pain is the result of dysfunction and it also means that they are not when the pain is caused by structures so badly damaged that the only reasonable approach is to handle the situation with pharmacopea or surgery. When pain is not secondary to dysfunction chiropractors are again not interested as these problems are either so low down the scale that they do not warrant the treatment and cost incurred or the pain is organic in origin which is the remit of another profession alltogether.
Our professional remit is defined by the nature of the relationship between structure and function of each and every case presenting to us. So, not quite “weasel marketing phrases”, just a concept that is outside of your day-to-day, which I appreciate. I just hope you aren’t claiming that “what you don’t know/are comfortable with isn’t worthwhile knowing”.

That they “will fool no-one here” has more to do with the blind leading the blind, something not quite out of the ordinary in the world of blogging…
Stefaan Vossen