News Staff
Julian Rait
Julian Rait
President of the Australian Medical Association

Health Minister & AMA President Condemn Chiropractors Despite Their Own Poor Record

Australia ranks just above Slovenia, Estonia and Lithuania in infant mortality, has a growing 34% caesarean section rate and 19% of babies delivered in Australia are yanked out using forceps or vacumn extraction.

Things don't get any better if they are lucky enough to survive the early years of medical intervention. 18,000 people die every year in Australian hospitals through preventable medical negligence, 50,000 people suffer from permanent injury annually as a result of medical negligence in Australia and 80,000 Australian patients per year are hospitalized due to medication errors. Another report suggests at least 230,000 admissions annually in Australia are caused by patients taking too much or too little of a medicine, or taking the wrong medicine – with an estimated annual cost of at least $1.2 billion.

But apparently this crisis is nothing to worry about because the Victorian Health Minister and the President of the Australian Medical Association are instead focusing their outrage on the chiropractic profession for caring for babies.

The comical outrage by Australian public health officials followed the posting of an innocuous video of a baby receiving gentle chiropractic care from a chiropractor who was most likely attempting to help problems created by the violent birth practices that are used in such high frequency in Australia.

Nevertheless, the Australian media trotted out the usual suspects to condemn the practice of chiropractic care of children while 50 Australians were killed by medical care that very same day. Of course there was no outrage about that.

If you were overseeing the profession responsible for one of the leading causes of death, it makes sense to ditch your ethics and try and come up with a scapegoat whenever you can. Chiropractors have historically provided just the remedy for these medics who go on about their business while 50 people die in Australia every day from errors under their watch.

No, the real problem are the chiropractors.

According to Julian Rait, President of the Australian Medical Association:

"The idea, or at least the concept of actually doing spinal manipulation in an infant is something the AMA would seriously discourage parents from pursuing."

Rait is an eye doctor, not a chiropractor and presumably has never had any chiropractic training but he woke up this week as an expert in chiropractic.

Rait was joined by Australia's Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos, a lawyer also presumably with no health care training, who 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. Which they did immediately - forcing the chiropractor to stop caring for children until the investigation is complete.

Though its seems he has already been tried and convicted by the Australian public health and medical authorities.

While ignoring the 19% of babies who are pried out of their mother's womb with metal forceps or a high powered vacumn, Mikakos shared her concern about fragile baby spines in the hands of chiropractors stating:

"Newborn babies are extremely fragile and it’s important to be aware that the damage done to an infant may not be obvious immediately and may not manifest until years later."

The irony that is lost on Mikakos is so great it is sickening.

But she doesn't end there - with no results of an investigation in hand Mikakos went on to state:

"The [CBA] must condemn this practice as unprofessional and unacceptable, and AHPRA must act quickly to stop these rogue practitioners in their tracks."

Rogue practitioners?

The chiropractic adjustments and procedures shown in the video that she is losing her mind over are all standard procedures taught in chiropractic schools across the world and especially as part of post graduate training in chiropractic pediatrics. In fact, they are used by medically trained manual therapists all over the world - not just chiropractors. Hopefully Mikakos and her AMA posse will be saddling up and going after those folks as well.

McCoy Press