Australia's Victorian Health Minister "Appalled" Over Baby Being Adjusted

Australia's Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos, a lawyer presumably with no health care training, said a video posted of an infant being gently adjusted by a chiropractor was “extremely disturbing” going on to assert that children undergoing chiropractic was appalling and that they were being ". . . exposed to potential harm".

Mikakos reported the chiropractor to the Chiropractic Board of Australia and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, and asked them to investigate and take action.

And just what is the Health Minister getting so hysterical, appalled and disturbed by?

Just about the most gentle adjustment on an infant you can see. In the video the chiropractor uses an inversion technique to assess for obstruction of the nerves in the spine. The technique is taught by mainstream chiropractic organizations such as the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association (ICPA) as well as by medical manual therapists. The chiropractor also uses a low force, hand held adjusting instrument to adjust the baby's spine - the same way thousands of chiropractors adjust the spines of infants. Both the test and the adjustments are taught in all chiropractic pediatric post graduate training programs.

Apparently Mikakos hasn't spent much time around infants being cared for in the industry she regulates. Perhaps she should attend some births where the medical doctors twist baby's necks, use forceps and vacuum extraction causing the very problems that the chiropractor was attempting to correct. Those facts are some of the most well documented in the medical literature. 

Perhaps instead of worrying about one of the safest health care professions in the world, she should check the statistics on birth trauma in Australia - or better yet investigate the 18,000 people that die every year in Australian hospitals through preventable medical negligence, the 50,000 people who suffer from permanent injury annually as a result of medical negligence in Australia or the 80,000 Australian patients per year that are hospitalized due to medication errors.

Don't hold your breath. It would be nearly impossible for Mikakos to "investigate" the very industry she purports to regulate so instead she goes after a harmless chiropractor to garner some headlines and fool people into thinking she is protecting the public health. Mikakos is no stranger to controversy either. Just last year when she was Minister for Families and Children Mikakos was suspended from Parliament on after calling her opponents racists and refusing to withdraw her claim.

Since the chiropractic profession in Australia has basically surrendered to medical authority and has no self esteem beyond what the medical authorities give them it is not expected that the Chiropractic Board will do what they should do and tell the Health Minister to go clean up her own backyard. In previous incidents of a similar nature the chiropractic board agreed with this type of ridiculous and silly outrage and sanctioned the chiropractor.