adverse effect
In 2010, I have reviewed the deaths which have been reported after chiropractic treatments. My article suggested that 26 fatalities had been published in the medical literature and many more might have remained unpublished. The alleged pathology usually was a vascular accident involving the dissection of a vertebral artery. Whenever I write about the risks of spinal manipulation, chiropractors say that I am irresponsible and alarmist. Yet I believe I am merely doing my duty in alerting health care professionals and the public to the possibility that this intervention is associated with harm and that caution is therefore recommended.
Fortunately, I am not alone, as a new report from China shows.This review summarised published cases of injuries associated with cervical manipulation in China, and to describe the risks and benefits of the therapy.
A total of 156 cases met the inclusion criteria. They included the following problems: syncope = 45 cases , mild spinal cord injury or compression = 34 cases, nerve root injury = 24 cases, ineffective treatment or symptom increased = 11 cases ; cervical spine fracture = 11 cases, dislocation or semiluxation = 6 cases, soft tissue injury = 3 cases, serious accident = 22 cases including paralysis, death and cerebrovascular accident. Manipulation including rotation was involved in 42.00%, 63 cases). 5 patients died.
The authors conclude that “it is imperative for practitioners to complete the patients’ management and assessment before manipulation. That the practitioners conduct a detailed physical examination and make a correct diagnosis would be a pivot method of avoiding accidents. Excluding contraindications and potential risks, standardizing evaluation criteria and practitioners’ qualification, increasing safety awareness and risk assessment and strengthening the monitoring of the accidents could decrease the incidence of accidents” (I do apologize for the authors’ poor English).
It is probable that someone will now calculate that the risk of harm is minute. Chinese traditional healers seem to use spinal manipulation fairly regularly, so the incidence of complications would be one in several millions.
Such calculations are frequently made by chiropractors in an attempt to define the incidence rates of risks associated with chiropractic in the West. They look convincing but, in fact, they are complete nonsense.
The reason is that under-reporting can be huge. Clinical trials of chiropractic often omit any mention of adverse effects (thus violating publication ethics) and, in our case-series, under-reporting was precisely 100% (none of the cases we discovered had been recorded anywhere). This means that these estimates are entirely worthless.
I sincerely hope that the risk turns out to be extremely low – but without a functioning reporting system for such events, we might as well read tea-leaves.
