Recently I spent a week in an ICU watching a fantastic team of highly trained doctors and nurses use every technology at their disposal to keep my mother alive after a blood clot in her brain nearly killed her. Machines that help her breathe, feed her, and monitor every vital system in her body. Doctors prescribing drugs to thin her blood, control pain, and reduce swelling. Nurses keeping track and filtering data, while simultaneously fawning over her as if she was their own mother.  A well oiled machine-made possible by science.  This is the good side of medicine.

The day after I got home my wife handed me an envelope she got as an insert in the bottom of a shopping bag (not a good start, I know).  The envelope was very thick with the word “Chiropractic” on the outside.  Knowing that not all Chiropractors subscribe to the more fantastical claims of Straight Chiropractic, I fought off the urge to roll my eyes and opened the envelope.  What I found inside was nothing short of astonishing.  The list of procedures included laser therapy, body chemistry diagnostics, heavy metal testing, Ion foot baths and ear candling.  After reading the seven pamphlets of incredible claims (evidence of which the  references and studies failed to validate) included in this packet-o-crapola, I remembered a phrase my father says, “A man is as good as the company he keeps.”  If this is the company Chiropractic keeps, then I know all I need to know.  Modern medicine is flawed and incomplete, but when you see the best and the worst at the same time, then the false balance people give to pseudo medicine is painfully clear.