What the Recent Meningitis Outbreak Should Teach Us
When a tragedy takes place, we must learn from it and make necessary adjustments to prevent something similar from happening in the future.
With the toll from the recent meningitis outbreak in the United States currently at 21 dead and 247 sickened, what can be learned from this terrible and inexcusable event?
To put it simply, the lesson that should be learned is we must first look to a safer means of health care to address pain and health conditions before resorting to prescription drug injections, medications and surgery. That safer alternative is chiropractic care.
Tainted drug injections administered for the treatment of back pain are responsible for the recent outbreak of meningitis and all the needless deaths. It’s important for people to understand that chiropractic care is a safe and proven method for addressing health conditions like back pain without utilizing risky drug injections or expensive prescription medications.
The following is an article from Dr. Matt Loop, a chiropractor in Atlanta, Georgia. It provides a great explanation as to why people should look to chiropractic care first. As the meningitis outbreak has shown, failure to look to chiropractic care initially may be deadly.
Yours In Health and Wellness,
Dr. Paul Baker and Dr. Patrick Baker
Fact or Fiction: Chiropractic Saves Lives?
By Dr. Matt Loop
This may be a little controversial for some, but it needs to be brought into open discussion. There are some out there they say chiropractic care is dangerous and others that say chiropractors actually save lives. So, what’s the real answer?
Let’s start with a not-so-obvious, indisputable fact.
Chiropractors pay roughly $2,000 per year in medical malpractice insurance (give or take a few hundred).
The average medical doctor pays around $10,000 per year. A surgeon can easily pay 6-10 times more than that.
According to the insurance companies, chiropractic treatment is on average 5x safer than standard medical care. This might shock some but the annual premium numbers do not lie.
If chiropractic was really dangerous, malpractice fees would be much higher (similar or above that of an MD). I’m not sure it gets more objective than that.
With that said, the truth is chiropractors DO save lives and here are 3 reasons why:
(1) People that see a chiropractor are less likely to need surgical procedures.
I don’t care how much some MD’s down-play it, even the smallest of operations come with several risks. Surgical infection being the primary one. Not to mention your odds of contracting some other virus through a nosocomial infection (hospital acquired).
It might surprise you to find out just how many people go into the hospital for a “simple” procedure and wind-up passing away.
We have the best trained crisis care medical doctors in the world, but medical errors do happen regularly. Actually, in the US, iatrogenesis is one of the leading causes of death.
It’s better to seek the conservative chiropractic approach first so you don’t have to gamble with your health. Going to a chiropractor either for a back injury, spinal hygiene, OR maintenance / wellness care keeps your spine and nervous system in great shape.
You don’t need to search too much in the medical literature to validate the fact that chiropractic care keeps people out of surgery and reduces medical costs.
Keeping patients from unnecessary surgery and hospital time saves lives.
(2) Those that visit a doctor of chiropractic are more educated about the human body and less likely to take drugs.
From treating thousands of patients over the years, it seems that practically everyone is on some type of drug. It’s very sad to see people dependent on a system and therapy that will NEVER cure their problems / diseases.
This indoctrination has occurred because of massive, relentless campaigns of UNETHICAL influence-based marketing by Big Pharma, the AMA, and the FDA.
The public has been intentionally dumbed-down, which has been great for big business. Medical research studies are ghost-written and fabricated frequently. It’s anything but science.
Public perception was also purchased a long time ago as I pull back the curtain in Chapter 2 of Cracking the Cancer Code.
Here’s the crazy thing, though…
By definition, allopathic drug therapy is “a system of treating disease by inducing a pathologic (disease producing) reaction that is antagonistic to the disease being treated.” Hence the reason why there are always adverse side effects.
What the public is not told is that ALL medication is toxic and poison to your system! It doesn’t restore health, it merely “masks” symptoms.
The masses have been deceived into thinking that if the symptom is taken away, health is restored. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Cancer, heart disease, and diabetes (a few examples) begin without you ever consciously noticing any pain, symptoms or abnormal lab-work.
Chiropractors educate patients about how to take control of their health naturally.
The more educated people are about how their body works, the less likely they are to take drugs and fall prey to the legal drug cartels. The less folks take drugs, the less chance of irreversible damage or accidental death.
The human body is always trying to maintain a homeostatic norm… meaning it has an intrinsic, innate life-force that guides and automatically directs your body’s healing process. It’s not something you have to consciously think about.
Chiropractors have long embraced this irrefutable, vitalistic truth and look for the cause of problems, enabling them to trouble-shoot effectively.
Drugs don’t cure.
In fact, prescriptions for non-life threatening diseases kill tens of thousands annually. Tylenol alone kills roughly 500 people each year. Not to mention it’s responsible for 26,000 hospitalizations yearly, too!
Chiropractors save lives by educating and empowering consumers to get off risky medications.
(3) Chiropractic patients are more likely to understand importance of the human Nervous System in regards to optimal health
It’s a medical and scientific fact that the nervous system directs and coordinates every function of the body. The brain acts like the main control-panel and sends messages down the spinal cord which eventually break-off into nerves (power lines).
If one of the spinal cord pathways or nerves is “choked” / compressed, then the brain cannot communicate at 100% to the innervated muscle, organ, etc.
Not to get too in-depth here, but the spinal cord is composed of different tracts (like a bunch thin strings grouped together) and depending where the compression occurs, will correlate to the symptoms that present.
Let me give a quick, obvious example.
You may have heard the term slipped or herniated disc. Either of these conditions can cause compression on the spinal cord and / or nerves. When this happens, patients can experience pain, numbness, tingling, decreased circulation, muscular weakness and other symptoms.
Sometimes, they might not experience any noticeable symptoms, though.
The bottom line is that when this nerve compression occurs, you LOSE FUNCTION. The life is literally being taken away from the area the nerve connects to. If you’re a chiropractor or medical doctor reading this, you’ve probably seen the above example frequently in your office.
To restore function and optimal health, the nerves need to be free of the interference that’s causing the problem. When you take the pressure off the nerve, you bring-back normal communication and the symptoms go away in this instance.
Make sense?
This is one example of where a chiropractic adjustment can help restore normal function and communication between the brain and bodily systems involved. What I’m referring to here is the obvious of the obvious, in terms of nerve compression.
Here’s another slightly different example.
When a patient has a stroke and a pathway in the brain is damaged, they can experience symptoms like speech problems, involuntary muscular contractions, visions problems, paralysis on one side of the body, etc.
They have literally LOST FUNCTION of certain lower motor areas due to the lesion.
Think of a lesion in the stroke example as like a road block. Your brain cells are always trying to regenerate but in some cases they have to take a detour around the road block to get back on track. The pathway needs activation primarily.
An experienced chiropractic neurologist can accelerate this healing process and help the brain form those collateral pathways in order to restore proper function.
We see it all the time as stroke patients regain their temporarily lost functions, many times returning back to normal. The body is always trying to heal itself, sometimes it just needs a guiding hand to speed things up.
So, what about those compressions or lesions that aren’t so obvious?
The reality is, sometimes a muscle, ligament, fluid / inflamed tissue, and a bone can cause compression. If it’s in the spine, this is called a vertebral subluxation. Sometimes symptoms manifest, but sometimes not.
Regardless if evident symptoms are created, a subluxation can have severe consequences on the joint complex, associated nerve, and eventually decrease its function. If the nerve supply is compromised, then the connected muscles and organs can begin to lose function.
Chiropractors are trained to check for those areas of dysfunction and correct the corresponding subluxation. This increases life to the tissue and helps to maximize health.
An important FYI here… symptoms are a poor, and many times unreliable, way to judge health. Heck, over 40% of the time, the first symptom of heart disease is a heart attack and death.
Chiropractors, as well as their patients, are typically more proactive and “prevention-centered” when it comes to health.
This leads to longer, healthier lives with reduced instance of having to go to the MD, getting caught-up in a medical system that neither cures or restores health. This is yet another way chiropractors save lives.
Let me be clear, though.
In terms of crisis-care or immediate life-threatening illnesses, the medical profession works wonders and we’re blessed to have such technology and specialists.
However, for most everything else including chronic disease management and treatment, medicine is severely lacking.
This is because the American medical system is based on a FLAWED paradigm of treating symptoms on not the underlying cause or whole person. Unfortunately, it was intentionally set-up this way for private interest. It’s business and has nothing to do with health.
Medical doctors get trained by fresh-out-of-undergraduate school pharmaceutical reps and are lavished with free meals, beautiful vacations, and many other perks by Big Pharma. On the books, this is illegal, but it still happens all the time creating influence and favorable opinion.
It’s a strong conflict of interest, as it shapes and molds the way many MD’s practice medicine. The “modern” medical system has created a society of dependent addicts.
It’s time for Americans to empower themselves so they can take control of their health once and for all!