I am currently studying DD Palmer’s TEXTBOOK OF THE SCIENCE, ART, AND PHILOSOPHY OF CHIROPRACTIC. It is a 1 000 page volume full of ignorance, repetition, allegation, pomp, overstatement and utter nonsense. I strongly advise everyone to stay well clear of it.
However, skimming through this accumulation of flimflam, I was repeatedly reminded of the origin of the anti-vax stance to which so many chiropractors still subscribe. Yes, I did mention this before: Far too many chiropractors believe that vaccinations do not have a positive effect on public health.
In his book, originally published in 1910, Palmer tried (unsuccessfully, I fear) to explain the basic principles of chiropractic. Most chiropractors would have read at least some of this ‘textbook’. It therefore stands to reason that Palmer’s views still colour those of today’s chiropractors.
Here are a few quotes about immunisation directly from the book:
- On May 14, 1796, Jenner first committed the crime of vaccination…
- No person is improved by being poisoned by either smallpox or vaccination.
- [Vaccination] is the biggest piece of quackery and criminal outrage ever foisted upon any civilized people. Medical ignorance by which criminal outrages are murdering our children all over this country…
- Vaccination and inoculation are pathological; Chiropractic is physiological.
- Compulsory vaccination is an outrage and a gross interference with the liberty of the people in a land of freedom.
The question is, where did Palmer get this from? What is the reason for his anti-vax attitude? Reading the book, I get the impression that it might have been based on two main pillars: 1) his amazing ignorance and blinkered view on most things and 2) his deep antipathy of conventional medicine. To show you a little of the latter, here are just two further quotes:
- It is a pity that the medical profession are possessed of arrogance instead of liberality; that instead of encouraging and fostering advanced ideas, they stifle and discourage advancement; that they only adopt advanced ideas when they are compelled to do so by public opinion.
- The physician believes in his prescriptions; the pharmacist in the hidden power of drugs – superstitious therapeutics.
To this, I am tempted to add: … and chiropractors believe in the drivel written by DD Palmer over 100 years ago.
45 Responses to Ever wondered why so many chiropractors are profoundly anti-vax?
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I can quote plenty of nonsense from medical textbooks published in 1910… what does that prove??? Will you take advise from a surgeon basing his practice on 1910 knowlege???
1) read the title of the blog post
2) I did not quote from textbooks but from ONE SINGLE book overflowing with nonsense
3) medical textbooks from 1910 do not form the basis for teaching medicine today; while Palmer’s BS is the basis of much of today’s chiropractic
It is a pity that the medical profession are possessed of arrogance instead of liberality; that instead of encouraging and fostering advanced ideas, they stifle and discourage advancement; that they only adopt advanced ideas when they are compelled to do so by public opinion.
Well, after reading the historian of science David Wooton’s book, Bad Medicine I have a certain sympathy with that opinion. 🙂 It often seemed that medical practice lagged far behind biological sciences and even medical research in the centuries leading up to the beginning of the 20th century.
except, of course, that this was written by one of the most arrogant quacks in medical history, and the year was 1910!
Anti-vax BS is one of the biggest threats we need to deal with today…..
No one teaches this book in chiropractic faculties for decades…
I know. It is far too unwieldy.
but the ideas in it are still those of chiro schools
Guy Almog:
Why not?
If chiropractic schools have given up on Palmer, what do they have left?
They have found that the coronavirus is a bat virus with elements of a snake virus inserted in the dna. Either created for biowarfare or more likely created for purposes of vaccination. The insanity of the vaccination industry continues. The Vax BS is one of the biggest threats. Long term experimentation on our populations without any control group. No thought to what the effect will be on future generations or what effect it is likely having on the skyrocketing incidence of chronic illness in younger and younger populations.
who are they?
where is the evidence?
Roger
Have you been reading Natural News again? What have we told you about that?
@ Roger
“They have found that the coronavirus is a bat virus with elements of a snake virus inserted in the dna. Either created for biowarfare or more likely created for purposes of vaccination. The insanity of the vaccination industry continues. The Vax BS is one of the biggest threats. Long term experimentation on our populations without any control group. No thought to what the effect will be on future generations or what effect it is likely having on the skyrocketing incidence of chronic illness in younger and younger populations.”
What a totally moronic comment! and your evidence for this totally fact free and delusional rant is…..????
Immunisation is the single most successful health measure ever taken and has saved millions of lives (human and animal) – whereas whatever SCAM therapy you are flogging will have zero evidence of saving ANY lives at all.
Smallpox ERADICATED by vaccines – perhaps you could name any disease that had been eradicated or even slightly impacted by any SCAM? (with real evidence) No, thought not.
That which can asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence
yes, he is good at moronic comments, isn’t he?
I think we need to do a large scale experiment with not vaccinating children for a few years, and I am sure that many parents will be begging the doctors to please vaccinate their children because so many around them have already died….. Let’s see if the anti-vaxers at that time still want their bogus ‘proper’ studies……
you need to randomise the 2 groups to make them comparable – good luck!
Nah, double-blind randomized trials are only needed when you have small effects. This can be done without much hassle as a longitudinal study like many epidemiological studies….
wrong again
Oh, epidemiologists are wrong with their research methodologies, interetsing
no, but you are!
Well, several of the best studies examining whether thimerosal causes autism are based on longitudinal studies. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080107181551.htm https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18180424
sorry to hear that you have ZERO understanding of research methodology
Yeah I guess my lack of research methodology knowledge is why they liked me so much at the CDC and FLDOH where I worked on one of their national research projects….. Sorry, done 15 years of research and published all the way to Nature and I actually worked as an epidemiologist researcher……..
But I accept that you think I have zero understanding of research methodology because I am not always agreeing with you…….
sorry, I should have stated:
ON THIS BLOG, YOU HAVE DISPLAYED ZERO UNDERSTANDING OF RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
I don’t know about elsewhere, and I don’t care a hoot either
I have provided you with published articles based on a well-established epidemiological research approach where you look at the development over time of a disease and compare the trend before and after an intervention or the removal of an intervention. Basically, outbreak investigation. I’m not sure how many graphs I have seen that do exactly that. With somewhere in the graph an arrow to indicate when the intervention started, or when the intervention stopped. Samoa will be one of those where you can draw an arrow when vaccination rates started to drop and how measles cases would go up, and a second arrow when they started to vaccinate again and how the number of cases drops down dramatically.
What ‘spontaneously’ happened in Samoa, we can just do on a large scale elsewhere and we would get the same results.
Here is an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine#/media/File:Measles_US_1944-2007_inset.png
@Kim Forehand
Perhaps it would just make more sense to make vaccines without the ethel-methel bad stuff in them, you know what I’m referring to.
We could call them healthy vaccines. They could do it if they wanted to. Why don’t they ?
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Wow! 😀 😀 😀
yes, the BS promoters are in good form today!
@RG
Much as I hate to puncture your balloon of paranoid foolishness, thimerosal (ethylmercury) has not been present in childhood vaccines for many years.
This is a major problem for antivaxers who had trumpeted for its removal because they imagined it was triggering ASD in their children. And its removal made no difference – because their is no link between vaccines and ASD.
Which is why they now go on about nasty aluminium adjuvants.
The problem being that the MMR vaccine, which started all this twenty years ago with the foul predatory quack Andrew Wakefield’s retracted paper, contains no aluminium adjuvants.
But things like logic and evidence aren’t strong points with antivaxers.
When RG says “ethel-methel bad stuff” he is probably referring to Ethel Merman, who according to Wikipedia once responded to a request that she put a dollar in a swear box for saying “where the hell does this go” by saying, “how much will it cost me to tell you to go **** yourself?” Bad stuff indeed!
Well, it makes about as much sense as the rest of RG’s post, which indicates that even if others know what he’s talking about, he certainly doesn’t.
@Lenny
This is the narrative, that thimerosal has been eliminated. This is not the case. Do some reading.
First of all, the preservative is still present in flu vaccines…. which is a big problem since flu vaccines are recommended by MD’s every year. The amount of exposure over a lifetime would be significant.
Beyond that, thimerosal has NOT been eliminated from all other vaccines. This is what they want us to believe.
If you read the white papers.
You will find that statements are made of vaccines still containing trace amounts for children below the age of six years, with no claims of being thimerosal above six years. Also of vaccines being “available” without thimerosal. Simply being made available might assume that vaccines might be thimerosal free, however guarantees nothing. These statements represent gaps in the mercury-free vaccine narrative.
Furthermore, the approved acceptable standards set for mercury consumption/exposure are considered for exposure of mercury levels via ingestion. The fact that mercury/thimerosal injected into body mass is absorbed into the blood stream in a matter of seconds makes a huge difference in the way thimerosal will avail itself to the brains of children. Mercury ingested will have much less bio-availability, so to use that standard of measure is inaccurate.
https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/thimerosal-vaccines-questions-and-answers
Nah, my response was one out of frustration with the abject nonsense that comes from anti-vaxers who have no idea about the science behind it. Reality is that vaccines are safer than the diseases they prevent. We literally just had a ‘natural experiment’ occur on Samoa where fear resulted in drops in vaccination rates, with as a result 80+ dead babies. And now they have stopped dying now that vaccination rates are going up.
I am not blind to the fact that some children have an adverse response to the vaccines. And for the individuals, that is horrible. However, I am also not blind that on a population scale, the pain and suffering caused by the vaccine side effects is far smaller than the pain and suffering caused by the diseases.
As for thimerosal, that one has shown to not be the cause of autism, because if it was, autism rates should have dropped dramatically once it was removed from most vaccines.
Can vaccines be improved, probably. But considering how much money is put in researching over and over again how vaccines do cause XXX, and concluding it does not, maybe anti-vaxers could get real and instead of peddling the so maniest falsehood to satisfy their own fear, they might want to accept science so that we have more money to improve vaccines….
Maybe its got something to do with the remedies?
:/
“That which can asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”
Since you provided no evidence for your assertation that “Immunisation is the single most successful health measure ever taken”, I dismiss it without evidence:
Plumbing is the single most successful health measure ever taken.
This article is quite interesting.
The contribution of vaccination to global health: past, present and future
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4024226/
Where’s your evidence about plumbing?
@Mike Warren
Plumbing? Have a re-read of the first para in the Introduction of the paper you link to.
Fig. 1 in https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4829a1.htm also puts the contribution of vaccines in perspective relative to improvements in sanitation.
This is emphatically not to denigrate the contribution of vaccination to global health. Therapeutic vaccines are currently being researched even for non-infectious diseases (including cancers). Any clinical success with these can only serve to emphasize the importance of vaccines. But please let’s not enthusiasm for vaccines overshadow the phenomenal contribution to global health of simply separating water supply from sewage outflow.
Frank,
Both papers seem to focus on infectious diseases. Since mark was just generally talking about “successful health measures”, I would guess that modern dentistry would make the top 10 list, too. And anaesthesia.
And contrary to the defending-chiroquackers there has never been a ubiquitous, well documented, well-explicated “shift” fully and completely away from the DD & BJ fraud (and if there was, WHEN was it and WHAT did it say?). “They” (the sanctimonious DCs) defend themselves by playing chameleon; getting their faux doctorate then morphing into lesser PTs, biomechanists or exercise physiologists and scoffing at critics and those educated in logic who recognize bullshit when they smell it. Or more likely argue a “rational DC doctrine” to critics and blog sites but sell the fraud to their “patients” behind a closed door.
And it’s odd how several of my chiroquacker acquaintances get their pets immunized without much coercion.
I really don’t know where you get your ideas from but I have learned not to try and confuse you with the FACTS. You want to hang on to a text from 1910 you are more than welcome to do so… embarrassing as it may be.
If anything, these days the Israeli MOH is investigating 4 people for promoting an anti-vaccines campaign and guess what??? They are all MDs… what does that means… absolutely nothing… you have charlatans and irresponsible people from all walks of life.
see my post entitled: Far too many chiropractors believe that vaccinations do not have a positive effect on public health.
plus many other.
One is too many i would agree with you on that
whenever you agree with me, I get the suspicion that I might be wrong.
Dr. G. Almog
Well, I’ll give you that. You have successfully avoided the facts. Sorry, FACTS.
(To be honest, I dissected that sentence several different ways and cannot, with any degree of certainty, figure out exactly what you MEAN.)
Oh, there was a lot going on leading up to that time period….mandatory vaccination was a hot topic.
“93Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905).
“some physicians of great skill and repute, do not believe that vaccination is a preventive of smallpox.”
“vaccination ‘quite often’ caused serious and permanent injury to the health of the person vaccinated.”
“Jacobson insisted that compulsory vaccination was “hostile to the inherent right of every freeman to care for his own body and health,” the Court ultimately held that mandatory vaccinations were a valid exercise of the state’s power to protect the health and safety of the public.”
From
Kentucky Law Journal
Volume 90 | Issue 4
2002
School Vaccination Requirements: Historical, Social, and Legal Perspectives
James G. Hodge Jr.
Nah, my response was one out of frustration with the abject nonsense that comes from anti-vaxers who have no idea about the science behind it. Reality is that vaccines are safer than the diseases they prevent. We literally just had a ‘natural experiment’ occur on Samoa where fear resulted in drops in vaccination rates, with as a result 80+ dead babies. And now they have stopped dying now that vaccination rates are going up.
I am not blind to the fact that some children have an adverse response to the vaccines. And for the individuals, that is horrible. However, I am also not blind that on a population scale, the pain and suffering caused by the vaccine side effects is far smaller than the pain and suffering caused by the diseases.
As for thimerosal, that one has shown to not be the cause of autism, because if it was, autism rates should have dropped dramatically once it was removed from most vaccines.
Can vaccines be improved, probably. But considering how much money is put in researching over and over again how vaccines do cause XXX, and concluding it does not, maybe anti-vaxers could get real and instead of peddling the so maniest falsehood to satisfy their own fear, they might want to accept science so that we have more money to improve vaccines….
This article from today´s Science Journal is a great example of how the scientific method is -and should be- applied in the field of vaccination.
Unfortunately, the article reports about a devastatingly bad result from a large-scale (>5000 people, >100 million USD) HIV vaccination trial.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6478/611
I hope that the anti-vaxxers will one day understand that no serious scientist would make simple claims like “vaccines are 100% safe” or “vaccines work”.
Scientist TEST these things… and applying scientific strategies is simple the most honest & effective way to assess if something works or (as in this sad case) does not.
I can only imagine the huge disappointment of the many scientists involved in his project and the years of work that went into it.
However, failure is a big part of all scientific enterprises, and scientists will openly admit this.
This seems to be one of the most striking differences between scientists and SCAM proponents, faith healers and other charlatans. According to their reports, they never fail.