The ‘WORST PAPER OF 2022’ competition. 1st entry: A chiropractor’s view of science

I have decided to herewith start

The ‘WORST PAPER OF 2022’ competition

And I have already come across an article that I can nominate for it. It is entitled ‘What is the goal of science? ‘Scientific’ has been co-opted, but science is on the side of chiropractic‘. It is worth reading it in full, but in case you are in a hurry, I have extracted some bon mots for you:

• Most of what chiropractors do in natural health care is scientific; it just has not been proven in a laboratory at the level we would like.
•  It might be useful to review scientific method here. First, you make an observation, then pose a testable question based on that observation. You state your hypothesis, then design and perform an experiment, collect data and draw a conclusion.
• A lot of our information is based on observations or hypotheses, and that is not a bad thing.
• [conventional] medicine fails to be scientific because it ignores clinical observations out of hand.
•  the majority of the observations that we in the natural health community work with are not even taken seriously. We would like to think that this is not because the medical “scientific” journals sell ads to drug companies.
• we have multibillion-dollar corporations controlling our observations and our conversations about health — not very scientific.
• When something is labeled anecdotal, to the medical community it means it is unimportant. That is not necessarily true; it means a lot of people have made the same observation.
• [the pharma industries] have positioned themselves to be the ones who decide what is or is not true in our health care system.
• Combining the “anecdotal” information from colleagues and one’s individual clinical observations, elegant and effective models for disease and strategies for treatment begin to emerge.
• everyone in natural health care knows to combine therapies and the effects are often cumulative. For example, many asthmatics respond to magnesium supplementation. Some respond to taking vitamin C or another antioxidant. Most of us know that combining the two supplements increases favorable results.
• drugs have side effects and often harm the patient. They often work against each other. We don’t have that problem with vitamins and minerals; you will not harm the patient.
• we are not treating a disease, we are correcting a deficiency. If the asthmatic is deficient in magnesium, symptoms will improve. Giving magnesium is not a treatment of the asthma; it is fixing infrastructure.
• We don’t really treat disease; we improve infrastructure.
• When our patients improve, we know we are on the right track. That is what the scientific method is all about.
• Finding errors in physiology and correcting them may produce results where medicine has failed so miserably. We are following scientific method, but studies are expensive and some things, even though they seem to hold up anecdotally, have not been proven.

As the year is still young, this paper might not actually win the competition but I hope you agree that it is a worthy competitor.

Some of you will ask what is there to win in the ‘WORST PAPER OF 2022’ competition? I agree: a competition without a prize is no fun. Therefore, I suggest donating to the winner one of my books that best fits his/her subject. I am sure this will over-joy him or her.

Now we only need to determine how we identify the winner. I suggest that I continue blogging about nominated papers (I hope to identify about 10 in total), and towards the end of the year, I let my readers decide democratically.