The Steven Barrett White Paper

Usually, I write about the Thiol test, but this month there is a bump in the road.

I stand in horrified awe at the proof of intellectual barrenness when I get the forward from Dr. Matt McCoy of the white paper on subluxation written by Steven Barrett and company. He makes the claim that no proof of subluxation exists. . . .

Perchance no one has ever thought to take the time and expense to retrace the obvious? I mean, Steven, does luxation (a complete dislocation) exist in your estimation? So, how far advanced toward luxation does a subluxation need to go before it registers in your mind as a negative influence on the being?

If you don’t believe in subluxation, Steven, then how about you lean over at your waist so that your spine is parallel to the floor and stay there until you prove to yourself that the subluxation you have created (misalignment without dislocation) is either good for you or neutral to your wellbeing? In fact, I challenge you to this easy-to-do test that won’t have any negative impact on you – according to YOUR reading of the medical research – no matter how long you do it for.

I showed this posture to my 7-year old boy and he laughed nervously at my question if he thought this was a good idea to walk around with this alignment.

If its clear to a 7-year old, Steven – why do you have such a difficult time imagining that structure is related to function, and that the function of neurology is exquisitely linked to structure?

Allow me to select just five articles in the medical research literature, Steven, dealing with malalignment.

Spine Journal, 2007, subluxations in the spine of chickens alter the DNA of the related nerve, and this DNA alteration then leap-frogs up the spinal cord pathways to the mid-brain areas of global body control. Chickens are used because they, like us, are bipeds.

Steven – do you think those DNA changes are good for health or bad for health?

I select Wolff’s Law. A bone physically stressed by malposition (subluxation), Steven, exhibits changes in Piezo electric properties that stimulate osteoblasts that grow new bone that will bridge arthritically to the adjoining bone to lock it in place presumably because the malposition is a stress, an irritation and a biological disadvantage.

Steven – do you agree that arthritis is a pathological adaptation? If so, then if it is connected to the malposition by Wolff’s Law, how does your syllogism deny that malposition is also pathological?

I choose Alfe Brieg’s studies on postural malposition (again, Steven, subluxation) and his photos of spinal cord pulling. Steven, I defy you to find research evidence that says spinal cord pulling is a health neutral or beneficial phenomenon. If there is something out there that I have missed it will be as embarrassed as are you by the top-quality research proving that spinal cord pulling is dose-dependent deadly to function and homeostasis.

No one in their right mind can look at Brieg’s remarkable photographs of postural spinal cord pulling and not connect them to the Rancho Bernardo studies examining poor posture and commensurate losses of function, health and longevity.

I choose the Winslow autopsies of fifty cadavers and causes of death. Winslow concluded that the cause of death in the organs was ischemia that weakened organ cells to open the window of dysfunction and then disease. In all cases, the vasospasm resulted from nerve irritation descended from spinal malalignment. Other researchers have also described how challenged nerves facilitate and, to their downstream tissue fields, cause vasospasm that starves the tissue and also leads to the problem of regional toxicity due to compromised lymphatic return.

Steven - really?! - does none of this make a difference to you at "Quackwatch"?

I choose Harrison’s Model of the Spine, Spine Journal, the suggested new normal in medical biomechanics, that says that there IS a normal optimal shape of the human spine. This necessarily implies that there is then the reality of an abnormal suboptimal spinal alignment (subluxation), just as there is this reality in any other anatomical structure in the human body, i.e. a hand, a foot or a thigh.

In conclusion, Steven, given this cluster of dots in fundamental research – are you kidding us? Who here is the real Quack? Do you want us to take you seriously as a researcher, a public advocate, a man? . . .

Let me be the second to admit that there is abundant quackery in alternative medicine today, and I applaud your efforts when you are right. Because, to me, the fraud and woo-woo slow down the advance of the real and world changing.

And chiropractic is both.

And do you truly see no quackery in mainstream medicine worth dodging after on your "watch"?

Do you truly receive no funding the AMA or some other related entity with a corrupt financial interest in the delay or defeat of society's holistic evolution?

Steven, the AMA et al lost their ass to chiropractic in the Wilkes case. The case, based on the decades of evidence from a hallowed mole inside the AMA, exposed correspondence and the minutes to AMA et al meetings that showed how and why those “people” had no interest in truth and science but instead seemed motivated by mercenary manipulation of both medical and public education. They realized they could not destroy chiropractic themselves, that the only way to do it was to fabricate a completely fictitious “chorus of disparate voices” so to give the public the impression that “all credible sources” were down on chiropractic.

In their punishment for this conspiracy against truth, Steven, we chiropractors asked not for one farthing in retribution. We asked only that the AMA reverse course and serve the cause of truth, and cast their resources to undoing what they had wrought in public misperception.

And while they had their pants around their ankles, Steven, they agreed with the most winning sincerity.

. . . And so, does the proven conspiracy continue today with you as a clown on the top of the medical rattle?

I smell a rat. I smell chicanery, fakery, deceit and double-dealing even after the AMA lost their ass to us and promised the judge never to do it again. I want us chiropractors to make the AMA make good on their promise to be honest and act in the public interest, rather than their own.

Medicine’s “Chemical Machine Model”, that the body is a chemical machine, rather than a self-organizing, self-healing living thing (the discredited vitalistic model, says you) necessarily means that, for the 2,400 known medical conditions, if a person had all of them, they would be “cured” by having 2,400 different pills, surgeries or medical devices sloshing around inside them as in a half-empty trash bag, and tubes, hooks and calipers trailing behind them like harpoons in the hide of a drooling Frankenstein.

The vitalistic, holistic model says, by contrast, that all 2,400 conditions would be cured by the three elements of lifestyle – diet, activities and hygiene; chiropractic acting like hygiene for the human nervous system, clearing out the junk of stress build-up over the course of our lifetimes that medical research acknowledges to be the cause of all disease (Selye, Watmore and Kole).

For reasons not yet understood, chiropractic appears to act upon the brain and nervous system in ways that clean up this informational dysfunction, so that the body quits rotting from the inside out, the way it does when we eat poorly, the way it does when we become obese. Rot happens in proportion to our not living right, Steven. And you can cut away the rot and barrage it with pills - but the rot continues to extrude until you start living right.

There is something magical about living right.

Good diet and exercise do indeed do magical things for the body from inside out. So does chiropractic.

Steven, there’s only one thing wrong with chiropractic: It makes people have to take fewer drugs, surgeries and medical devices to battle the rot. It proves that our ever-more-costly over-reliance on these external solutions for an internal equation is defeatist, irrational and completely upside down.

To those influences that would maximize these solutions – chiropractic is insufferable.

As are you to us rational people.

Dr. David Walls-Kaufman