"Doctors not honest." So what else is new and startling?

 By J.C. Smith Special to The Telegraph 

I read with amusement the recent Article: "Study: Doctors not always honest with patients" (by Lauran Neergaard of the Associated Press, Feb. 9); 

She refers to a survey conducted by a Harvard Medical School professor, Dr. Lisa Iezzoni. Issues revealed among the 1,800 doctors surveyed included that some physicians were prone to be less than totally honest with patients about treatment mistakes, overly optimistic about prognoses, using exaggerations to scare patients, and failure to communicate to patients their options to make fully informed decisions. 

According to this report, "1 in 10 surveyed say they'd told a patient something that wasn't true in the past year." 

As a 30-year chiropractic practitioner, I would like to add the most glaring untruth practiced by most, but not all, MDs is their well known defamation of chiropractors. It is common knowledge that medical bigotry is still paramount among most doctors and within medical schools. 

Although racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobic prejudices have waned during the past few decades, the medical discrimination against chiropractic remains entrenched. 

This medical bigotry not only hurts the image of chiropractors, but it hurts patients and flies in the face of ethics and science. Modern research that began at 

Emory University in 1990 revealed the basis of spine surgery - the abnormal disc theory - to be invalid. Today spine researchers refer to disc abnormalities such as herniation and degeneration as "incidentalomas" because they are a part of the natural aging process like finding gray hair. 

In many cases, researchers found patients without pain to have abnormal discs while others patients with pain had none. Yet disc surgeries continue to increase in Georgia and the United States. 

On the other hand, as far back as 1994 an agency for the.U.S. Public Health Service did a two-year study on acute low back pain in adults that included more than 4,000 scientific articles and concluded that spinal manipulation was the preferred treatment in most cases. 

Other studies from Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the United States have confirmed that not only are spine surgeries unnecessary (with the exceptions of cancer, fracture,serious infections, or those rare cases that don't respond to conservative care), but epidural steroid injections and opioid narcotics are also ineffective, costly, dangerous and addictive. 

Recently, the North Carolina Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance company changed its policy that now states it will no longer pay for spinal fusion if the sole criteria is herniated or degenerated discs. They also cited the same research that 

shows disc abnormalities are a common part of the aging process. Hopefully this will sweep through all the states to save people from these often debilitating and unnecessary surgeries. 

Ironically, after nearly a century of persecution and defamation,the chiropractic profession has not only survived the medical war, but now stands vindicated as the best choice for most back pain problems that are often caused by joint dysfunction, which explains why manipulation, decompression. massage and other hands-on therapies are so effective. 

Considering there are 137 joints in the spine, most spinal disorders begin with these primary spinal misalignments that secondarily cause disc and pinched nerve problems.

The sad fact is most doctors today are aware that the disc theory is outdated. They also know drugs, shots and disc surgeries are expensive. ineffective and unnecessary. More so, they also know chiropractic care is the preferred treatment for 85 percent of back pain cases, yet very few have the ethics to refer to chiropractors for fear of retribution from their own medical collegues. 

Although this Harvard survey admits 10 percent Of MDs lied to patients during the past year, I dare say 90 percent have lied to their patients about chiropractors. If you want to test your doctor's ethics, ask him or her about chiropractic care and if you are given the usual slander, run as fast as you can from that office. It is past time to confront this medical bigotry as the last bastion of prejudice that has harmed the well-being of patients as well as the reputations of chiropractors. 

JC. Smith, MA, DC practices in Warner Robins.