Tokyo Chiropractic College Leaders Say Subluxation Denier Leboeuf-Yde's Recent Paper is Confused, Without Evidential Support & Demonstrates Low Level of Scholarship

In a paper just published in the Journal of Philosophy, Principles & Practice of Chiropractic, the President and Vice President of the Tokyo College of Chiropractic dissects a recent paper written by several well known Subluxation Deniers and demonstrates the flawed thinking and lack of scholarship promulgated by this hate group. The paper: A Critical Analysis of the Reality Distortion of Chiropractic Among Scientists with Constructive Criticism of the Current Debate was written by Phillip Ebrall BAppsSc (Chiropr), PhD, DC (Hon) President of the Tokyo College of Chiropractic and Yoshihiro Murakami BA, BCSc the Vice President of the school.

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The "Reality Distortion" they are referring to involves a previous paper written by Charlotte Leboeuf-Yde, Stanley I. Innes, Kenneth J. Young, Gregory Neil Kawchuk & Jan Hartvigsen titled: Chiropractic, one big unhappy family: better together or apart? The paper was published by the anti-subluxation research journal Chiropractic and Manual Therapies.

Leboeuf-Yde is a well known Subluxation Denier who was involved on the site team that preceded the initial denial of accreditation of McTimoney College of Chiropractic. So bad was her performance on the site team that McTimoney students compiled a dossier about the shocking things she said and did during the site team visit.

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Leboeuf-Yde has suggested in the past that chiropractic needed to be "sanitised" from chiropractors who promote subluxation and a vitalistic approach and this time she has brought along some colleagues to help her pepper the literature with her nonsense.

One of her co-authors on the paper, Greg Kawchuk DC, Ph.D and Chair of the World Federation of Chiropractic's Research Council compared bringing a child to a vitalistic chiropractor to bringing them to a Catholic priest at a children’s school at the March 2019 WFC Conference in Berlin. This is according to a complaint filed by the International Chiropractors Association.

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Another of her co-authors is Jan Hartvigsen DC, Ph.D who, in a separate presentation at the WFC Conference in Berlin, suggested that subluxation was imaginary and the practice of using x-rays to identify subluxation and outcomes of care was "absolutely rubbish".

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The "Unhappy Marriage" paper by Leboeuf-Yde, Kawchuk and Hartvigsen which denigrates the practice of chiropractic in a vitalistic salutogenic, subluxation model was promoted from the WFC platform in Berlin.

Leboeuf-Yde and her colleagues have been attacking subluxation management and the chiropractors who practice that way for some time and they do so by publishing papers in journals controlled by Subluxation Deniers.

These papers, according to Simon Senzon, Ph.D. a Fellow with the Foundation for Vertebral Subluxation, contain numerous errors regarding vertebral subluxation placed in them by “Subluxation Deniers” who have peppered the scientific and historical literature over the past 40 years with unreferenced and unsupported statements regarding the nature and historical issues surrounding vertebral subluxation.

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The paper by Ebrall and Murakami takes Leboeuf-Yde's team of Deniers to task demonstrating the flaws in their arguments and reasoning stating:

"The debate initiated by the European School of chiropractic is confused, presenting an allegorical allusion with no argument and no evidential support."

Ebrall and Murakami point out that Leboeuf-Yde et al's paper "demonstrates a low level of scholarship" and that the authors are engaging in "virtue-signaling" - feigned righteousness intended to make the speaker appear superior by condemning others.  Ebrall argues this ". . . evidence-free opinion may be expressed without the responsibility of justification."

The Tokyo College leaders assert that what these Deniers are doing amounts to "reality distortion" among chiropractic researchers from the associated disciplines of biomechanics and rehabilitation therapies and that the locus of this reality distortion sits within the ‘European School’ of chiropractic.

In their critique, Ebrall and Murakami show Leboeuf-Yde et al's position misrepresents the inherent nature of the discipline they condemn to division and they reject the Deniers arguments as flawed in both logic and argument further demonstrating that conservative chiropractors are not adhering to dogma - a recurrent theme of argument for division of the profession.

In line with Leboeuf-Yde's goal of "sanitising" the chiropractic profession of those focusing on subluxation Ebrall and Murakami take her to task reject her "lexicon cleansing."

Leboeuf-Yde and other anti-subluxation, anti-vitalistic researchers have attempted to re-cast Evidence-Based Chiropractic and assert that only they and others who have denounced vertebral subluxation are evidence based. The flawed argument is that one cannot practice in a vitalistic, salutogenic model of subluxation management and still be evidence based.

This flawed argument is at the heart of the current campaigns in the United kingdom, Australia and Canada to marginalize chiropractors who manage vertebral subluxation. It has also taken root in the United States in cases where state regulatory boards have been highjacked by Deniers.

Ebrall and Murakami describe the management of vertebral subluxation as an evidence-based biopsychosocial model of health care with the intent of maintaining whole-body well-being by the adjustment of subluxation to restore the neurophysiological mechanisms which maintain optimal function for an individual.

According to the Tokyo College leaders subluxation is well established and for anyone to ". . . imply that ‘belief in subluxation’ is divisive in the profession is to resort to argumentum ad terrorem, opinion designed to induce fear of alternate consequences when such consequences lack an evidential basis."

They go further arguing:

"It is not possible to argue that organ tonicity is not a factor under neurological control and it is not possible to argue joints do not subluxate."

They further state that its nonsense for any scientist to argue the concept of subluxation on the basis of opinion and without evidence asserting that "The reliability of some clinical tests thought to identify components of the vertebral subluxation have been reported . . . "

And in perhaps the best line of reasoning directed at the Deniers, Ebrall challenges Leboeuf-Yde and the assertion that her ‘evidence-friendly group’ do not subscribe to concepts such as subluxation and the spine as the centre of good health. Ebrall asks: "What is it their group actually does in the name of chiropractic?"

Ebrall and Murakami seize on Leboeuf-Yde's "Unhappy Marriage" analogy stating:

"We object strongly to sensationalism of social and scientific matters. After all, if we lower our own dignity and allow marriage conflict as an analogy of chiropractic, we make the observation that any divorce would see Conventional Chiropractic retain the family name with its major assets of subluxation and adjustment."

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