Limitations of Chiropractic
There are many things which can be done better by others than by a Chiropractor. There are others for which the Chiropractor’s training does not fit him at all and to which his methods do not in any sense apply. Knowledge of these limitations is just as essential as acquaintance with the powers of the vertebral adjustment.
Bony dislocations other than vertebral, fractures, wounds causing, or likely to cause, hemorrhage or severe internal injury, should at sight be diverted into the hands of a surgeon. The Chiropractor receives no training in handling such cases and has neither legal nor moral right to attend them. In obstetrics likewise no practical training is given which would prepare the practitioner for delivery and he is unprepared to use necessary asceptic or antiseptic measures.
Some individual cases of disease usually curable will have advanced so far as to require surgical interference. Abscesses or suppurative diseases internally located or having any liability to discharge internally must be avoided. Gangrene, cancer, the advanced stages of tuberculosis (usually) are incurable.
Quarantinable diseases as a class yield readily to adjustment unless some serum treatment has been administered, when the chances of recovery are greatly lessened. But such cases must be reported in conformity with the laws of the state and will probably then be taken out of the hands of the Chiropractor—unfortunately. The laws of the various states should be modified to permit Chiropractors, with precautions required of physicians to safeguard the public health, to pass quarantine. Every effort should be put forth to secure such legislation but until it is secured in any state and the Chiropractor’s work is brought under the supervision of the authorities, the laws must be respected strictly.
Syphilis and gonorrhoea, communicable diseases, should be recognized and refused in practice. The former in the primary and secondary stages (not tertiary) and the latter in all stages is corrective by adjustment but the liability of transmission of the disease warns against contact with it unless all precautions known to science be used to avoid possible transmission.
Congenital anomalies of structure do not yield to Chiropractic and are best let alone although no harm is likely to arise through any attempt to correct them by vertebral adjustment.
Relation of Chiropractic to Other Methods
There are certain other methods which present a superficial resemblance to Chropractic which leads many to believe them closely related. Such methods are Spondylotherapy, Osteopathy, etc. There is a system called Napravit or Naprapathy which may be dismissed with the statement that it is Chiropractic, renamed.
Spondylotherapy, on the other hand, is a system of treating disease which takes no account of the vertebral subluxation as its primary cause and seeks to cure disease by stimulating or inhibiting nerve action through the use of mechanical, thermic, or electrical means. Its resemblance is due solely to the fact that most of the treatment is applied to the spine. As well might we say that serum injection for meningitis is Chiropractic because the serum is introduced by lumbar puncture into the spinal canal.