Following on from my last post which compared the safety of visiting a Chiropractor vs visiting a GP, I will not attempt to summarise the findings of the other study cited in the New Scientist article. If you just want the bullet points, Richard Brown wrote ( http://bit.ly/unO7B) that the conclusion of this study was that the authors “found no causative association between chiropractic manipulation and stroke.”

Let’s go through what they did find.

In this study they looked at the outcome of treatment for nearly 20,000 patients, and found that in those treatments there was a total of 50,276 cervical (neck) spine manipulations. Which is a lot really. My personal opinion is that if something is unsafe, and you do it 50,000 times, something will probably happen.

There were no reports of serious adverse events. The definition of a serious adverse event was “referred to hospital A&E and/or severe onset/worsening of symptoms immediately after treatment and/or resulted in persistent or significant disability/incapacity”.

What they did next was try to work out the chances of a serious adverse event, and this is where my inability to perform even basic mathematics shows up. The authors said “This translates to an estimated risk of a serious adverse event of, at worse ≈1 per 10,000 treatment consultations immediately after cervical spine manipulation”.

Hang on!? If they followed 50,000+ manipulations, and there were no serious adverse events, doesn’t that make the risk approximately zero in 50,000!??! My understanding of maths and stats is clearly a fair way off the mark.

In any event, the take home message of the article was well summarised in the first paragraph (“no causative association between chiropractic manipulation and stroke”), and the authors conclusion was “the risk of a serious adverse event, immediately or up to 7 days after treatment, was low to very low.”

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