The so called Forward Thinking Chiropractic Alliance (FTCA) formerly called the "Dead Subluxation Society" will be holding its Annual Conference on the campus of Parker University on July 22-23, 2023.
Parker's Director of Research Katherine Pohlman DC, Ph.D, who claims there is no credible evidence to support chiropractic's role in immune function or autism (among other things), is scheduled to speak along with Dr. Ray Foxworth from ChiroHealth USA. There will also be lectures on ankle sprains, rehab and dry needling.
The FTCA is run and was started by Robert "Bobby" Maybee who currently sits on the Peer Review Committee of the Oregon Board of Chiropractic. The FTCA claims to have thousands of members.
Maybee is an anti-subluxation, anti-vitalism crusader who has been involved in a number of attacks on subluxation based, vitalistic chiropractors, schools and organizations. Indeed his Facebook group is a cesspool of hate directed at this faction of the profession. Maybee, and others like him, want chiropractors to be able to prescribe drugs and practice as primary care physicians.
Those hate filled fights oftentimes spill out of social media into the real world. One such episode was the attacks on subluxation chiropractors at the World Federation of Chiropractic (WFC) meeting in Berlin a couple of years ago that spawned a formal complaint by the International Chiropractors Association (ICA). The behavior involved attacks on practitioners who focus on the management of vertebral subluxation. It included the throwing of water bottles onto the stage and clapping and cheering as the management of subluxation was denigrated.
Interviewed on a podcast about the WFC fiasco Maybee wasted no time doubling down:
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It was Maybee and his group that developed and implemented a plan to teach and encourage like minded chiropractors how to file board complaints against other chiropractors who remained open during the height of the COVID pandemic.
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Maybee thanked the World Federation of Chiropractic, Parker University and the American Chiropractic Association telling his fellow Deniers after giving them their marching orders that:
"You are now properly armed with FACTS thanks to the WFC and Parker and ACA"
He was instructing his army of trolls to copy other chiropractors websites and Facebook pages where they were discussing immunity and use those screen shots to report them to the regulatory boards.
Hundreds of chiropractors and thousands around the world were hauled before regulatory boards during the pandemic and sanctioned based on the false claims put out by the WFC.
The World Federation of Chiropractic (WFC) and the American Chiropractic Association (ACA) along with William Morgan President of Parker University and Katherine Pohlman Director of Research at Parker have falsely claimed that there is no credible evidence supporting the beneficial relationship between chiropractic, the nervous system and immune function. Pohlman was subsequently rewarded with a position on the WFC Research Committee after several members stepped down in disgrace.
The WFC had put out a hit piece consisting of a highly flawed and biased "rapid review" of literature that falsley claimed there was no evidence chiropractic care could benefit immune function. The ACA through Keith Overland DC stated the same in a television interview and Parker University President William Morgan DC conducted an interview with Parker's Director of Research Katherine Pohlman DC, Ph.D who echoed the WFC's document snickering in an interview about it stating "There is no credible research" to support such claims. Morgan threatened chiropractors that if they suggested chiropractic boosted immunity that they would be "under the hand of the law" and that chiropractors were "making claims that they can't back up".
According to an interview with Maybee on a podcast hosted by Jeffrey Williams DC, who is also a rabid anti-vitalist, Maybee initially started the Dead Subluxation Society in 2014 "as an attempt to change the landscape and conversation around the chiropractic profession on social media".
Claiming that "All the vitalists owned social media groups at that time" he went on to say:
"I'm like, well, these guys are all not people I would want to listen to whatsoever. I know exactly who to not take advice from. And it's all these people that are doing all this posting. I saw there was like a thing going on then where if you were sort of an evidence based uh research minded science minded chiropractor, and you asked the question in these groups, they would just uh shout you out of the group for not sort of uh towing the vitalistic line."
Maybee and other Subluxation Deniers and anti-vitalists maintain that they are the sacred defenders of evidence based chiropractic and that practicing in a vitalistic, subluxation model cannot be evidence based.
During one of his interviews with Williams, Maybee takes a shot at Sherman College of Chiropractic and Dr. Christopher Kent DC, JD that illustrates this point stating:
"So there's like a, there's a, a position at one of those straight schools where they have like a dean of evidence based education. It's like that's just out, it's just you know it doesn't exist because you know the guy and you know the school and you know that they're not doing any of that whatsoever. Yeah like you're using that word but I don't think it means what you think it means".
In a jab at Dynamic Essentials the organization started by Sid Williams DC and still going strong today, Maybee stated in an interview:
"We need to let people know what they need to know, like what you should be aware of and maybe you don't need to be aware of um, I'll, I'll say it, I'm not afraid. Maybe, maybe you don't need to put so much emphasis in Dynamic Essentials."
"Vitalism is Not Science. There is No evidence"
According to Maybee vitalism has no role in a health care profession and he equates vitalism with a "dream":
"Your job is to sell a dream. Your job is to sell an idea that does not exist".
He believes "straight" chiropractors have 'absconded" the concept of evidence based stating:
" . . then there's other people who abscond with it, they steal the word and they, they take their vitalist ideas and they call them evidence based, my evidence based vitalism, which is absolute stupidity".
Recalling a time he participated on a committee to "progress the profession" he made fun of a "vitalist" chiropractor who was also on the committee stating (grammatical errors are Maybee's):
"He just seemed like a avatar of the average 60 year old vitalist chiropractor, you know, and he's kind of pissed at the world because the world is changing in front of his eyes. And he's like, I just think we need more vitalistic research. If we had more vitalistic research to prove what vitalism is, then the whole world is better off. And I'm like, well, Bubba, what vitalism is, is, and you should know this because you claim to be a vitalist. You should know what this is that you think you say you're doing. Vitalism is not science. There is no evidence, it's a placeholder for things you can't explain. So the minute you research something that's vitalistic and you prove it or disprove it, it, it at that moment, once you can label it with something that's objective, it ceases to be vitalistic, you're just killing yourself, man".
Maybee continued:
"So you can't prove, you can't prove it because once you prove it, it ceases to not exist. If that makes sense, it makes you yourself out of a job because then now it becomes evidence based. That gentleman was not happy at me as we're looking through the zoom screen and he's just staring vitalistically into the camera at me. That's the truth. You can't. So, so they do that".
Maybee also asserts that vitalistic chiropractors don't even really believe in it - stating they just do it for the money:
"I don't even know if many of them believe in it. I think a lot of them need to believe in it to make a living. Like they need to be, they need to call themselves vitalists because that's the only way they know how to make money is to market their practice from that point of view."
Maybee and others like him have constructed a false narrative making it easy to attack those who focus their practice on managing vertebral subluxation in a vitalistic model contending that they don't want to be regulated or have any standards, for example:
"If you want to do what vitalists really want to do, which is have no regulations be allowed to do whatever they want. Blah, blah, blah, go be a Reiki healer because this is a licensed profession, which means we have standards you have to meet to be a licensed professional".
No matter how Maybee and his gang from the FTCA spin it, the facts are that the majority of the profession embrace the concept of vertebral subluxation. The real issue is that the smaller faction of medically oriented chiropractors that want to limit care to pain management, primary spine care and push drugs are in power through the existence of several monopolies that operate as a Cartel within the profession and control the educational, testing, licensing and regulation of the profession.
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