Anti-vaccine chiropractors 20

The Chiropractic Board of Australia has had enough:

“We will not tolerate registered chiropractors giving misleading or unbalanced advice to patients, or providing advice or care that is not in the patient’s best interests,” chairman Phillip Donato said.

Dr Donato said chiropractors should only provide evidence-based treatment and anyone with concerns should report them. [Sydney Morning Herald August 9 2013]

Andrew Kaltenbach conducts business at Robina Town Chiropractic, in Queensland. Kaltenbach is a member of the Chiropractors’ Association of Australia.

What is it with the CAA as opposed to the more reputable (as it is now obvious) COCA? Why are there so many CAA anti-vaccine chiropractors? But, I digress.

Only one month ago Kaltenbach posted the Dianne Harper lie.

Kaltenbach 1 Harper gardasil comes clean lie

It has resurfaced again, of late. It was wrong when it first did the rounds. It’s still wrong now. See these awesome posts from Skeptical Raptor, and Orac.

I now know that Pathways to Family Wellness magazine is a big red flag for quackery. I admit I didn’t even know about it until recently. Kaltenbach posted this only last month:

Kaltenbach 2 how we are making our children sickTitles like that above generally get the skeptical antennae quivering and, unfortunately, I was right. This is from the article:

Vaccination

Most childhood infections are caused by viruses, and thus do not respond to antibiotics, hence the development of our current vaccine program. Infections contracted naturally are ordinarily filtered through a series of immune system defenses. Naturally-contracted viral diseases stimulate a cell-mediated response, and it appears that because of this, early viral infections are protective against allergic diseases. When a vaccine is injected directly into the blood stream, it gains access to all of the major tissues and organs of the body without the body’s normal advantage of a total immune response. This results in only partial immunity, consequently the need for “booster” shots. Vaccines stimulate a humoral response so their contents are never discharged from the body, the way they would be if the disease were naturally contracted, leaving the body in a chronic state of sensitization. In a study of 448 children, 243 had been vaccinated against whooping cough. Of these, 10% had asthma compared to less than 2% of the 205 children in the non-vaccinated group, suggesting that the pertussis vaccination can increase the risk of developing asthma by more than five times.

LOLWUT?

Kaltenbach 3 hw we are are making kids sick Pathways vaccinationTime for the CBA to get out the paddle. Here’s one we prepared earlier (thanks to a scaly pharma friend):

antivax paddlin'

But seriously, for all of you chiros who are interested in distancing yourselves from the ingrained anti-vaccinationism of the CAA, go and join the Chiropractic and Osteopathic College of Australasia (COCA). Do yourselves, and your integrity, a favour. I’m pretty sure none of the COCA board members are anti-vaccinationists, as is the case with the CAA.

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I'm reasonable, mostly.
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11 Responses to Anti-vaccine chiropractors 20

  1. Sue says:

    Someone failed Immunology 101. Infections become infections when the infecting organism has overcome all the various immune system barriers. Sigh.

  2. matutines says:

    I know I’m revealing a low order intellect by asking this…what is the motivation behind the chiropractic antivax stance? Are they positioning themselves in the woo marketplace? Is it a unique selling point? Do they actually believe the word salad and arrant caca like in the pic above? You can’t actually believe subluxing is real or that you can cure autism with a back rub. You have to be fooling yourself or have some other motivation.

    Sorry to derp on but I just….dont….understand. Help me, smart folks.

    • Andy says:

      I see this sort of fundamentalist chiropractic as a religion. It is solidly founded in the metaphysical concept of innate intelligence – a sort of self-healing life force that traverses our nervous system until it hits a subluxation. Fixing the undetectable subluxations and letting the innate intelligence flow freely is akin, in my mind, to praying and letting a god into your life to perform his healing magic. And we all have subluxations in the same way we’re all sinners. We all need to adopt the religion in order to be truly saved.

      As with homeopathy or creationism, science and evidence are the enemy. If vaccination works then vitalistic chiropractic doesn’t make sense because how can you prevent disease without fixing the subluxations that allow “dis-eases” to prosper – subluxations we all have… from birth!

      And if you can cure ear infections by rubbing a kid’s back, then clearly every other form of treatment (except other alternative treatments – even those based on a completely different non-evidence-based paradigm to chiropractic) is a scam.

      Medicine is to chiropractors as evolution is to creationists.

      Something like that.

      • Sue says:

        Very cogent analysis, Andy. This also fits with their anti-pharmaceutical stance – the ethos is not to interfere with the body’s ”innate ability to heal itself”. This goes for homeopathy too.

        Two things still puzzle me: why would every human body develop ”subluxations” – even a newborn exiting the womb. How well-designed is this innately perfect design if it can’t even survive the birth process.

        And secondly, how can graduates of university medical science courses believe this stuff?

  3. M smith says:

    Andy is I think pretty close to the mark.

    Real doctors don’t go on each others Facebook page and indulge in the sort of circle jerks that these “fundamentalist” chiros do. The backslapping when one gets called out on the quackery and calls for protection of their ideology from the onslaught of science and reason is very similar to what you see on the creationist Facebook pages.

    • Sue says:

      Good points.

      There is certainly a lot of back-slapping, Chiro of the Year awards and claims that (direct copy-paste from a site):
      ”When evaluating and treating patients, chiropractors take a holistic approach which includes identifying and correcting the cause(s) of the patient’s health ailment. In contrast, the medical approach tends to focus more on the treating the symptoms of a condition rather than focusing primarily on the actual cause(s).
      Chiropractors believe that correcting the cause of the problem provides significant long-term benefits over only treating the symptoms.

      How is it true that medicine only treats ”the symptoms”? Immunisation is a case in point!

      • Andy says:

        Chiropractors believe that correcting the cause of the problem provides significant long-term benefits over only treating the symptoms.

        And aren’t they lucky that the “cause” is always a subluxation?

  4. @advodiaboli says:

    Plus the Palmer fundamentalists clumping around the CAA, push that notion of replacing the family GP with chiropractic as the primary mode of health/sickness management. Apart from selling the nonsensical life force idea, evidence based medicine is cast as toxic or relying on “toxins”. Chiropractic exploits the consumers lack of knowledge and fear of untruths that aim to show medicine is unnatural.

    The antivax rhetoric is ideal to evoke fear of the unnatural to passively sell the natural approach of chiropractic, sans evidence. Thus (eg) aluminum in vaccines is a toxin to be avoided, not an adjuvant with an immunological role, because the latter leads to exposing chiropractic as meaningless.

    • Sue says:

      Chiro as primary care provider could only work in our society where medicine is there, ready to pick up the pieces. Or will the chiros be available 24 hours/7 days for all their patients’ primary care needs?

    • Andy says:

      If chiro is “natural”, why do we not see any other species (in the wild) performing it ?

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