Women left in agony after a €45 trip to a chiropractor
It’s a therapy thousands rely on for pain relief — but there’s growing doubts about its safety
EVERY time she ties her shoelaces or reaches down to pick up her handbag, Jessica Gladstone winces with pain.
The 30-year-old suffers from severe lower back pain; an injury she believes was caused by a series of visits to a chiropractor two years ago, which has left her having to pop painkillers with alarming regularity just to go to work and get on with her day.
‘I often feel like a 70-year-old,’ says Jessica, who works for a screen-printing company.
‘I went to see the chiropractor because I had a lot of pain in my left arm from the way I had slept and there was a long waiting time to see a physiotherapist.
‘But the severe crunching manipulations she then did on my neck and back left me with terrible lower back pain.’
The chiropractor told Jessica that residual pain was normal after treatment and that this was part of the healing process, persuading her to return for another six sessions at €45 a time.
‘I told her initially that I had hypermobility — where my joints have a large range of movement — but there was not much questioning or patient care,’ she says.
‘I was often in and out after 15 minutes with her doing little more than a few resistance exercises, then rotating my legs while I was lying on the table until there was a cracking sound in my lower back area.’ ‘The pain afterwards in the left side of my lower back was so bad I couldn’t go to work and had to spend the rest of the day in bed. For the next two weeks, I was taking at least eight painkillers a day.’
Frustrated and in agony, Jessica took her problem to an osteopath and then a physiotherapist, both of whom examined her back and saw that the left-hand side, where the pain was worst, was off centre.
‘The physio has given me exercises to build up the muscle in that area, but I can feel a constant ache most days and if I bend down too quickly, the pain is excruciating,’ says Jessica. ‘I really do believe the chiropractor caused this.’
Sadly, allegations of bad practice against chiropractors are not unusual and some patients have fared much worse than Jessica. Although there are no figures for Ireland, several hundred cases of patients being seriously and often permanently damaged after chiropractic manipulations have been documented by neurosurgeons in the US, and about 30 deaths have been reported, too.
What can happen in these tragic instances is that, on manipulation of the upper spine, an artery supplying the brain is overstretched and tears, leading to a stroke, which can be fatal.
In August last year, 80-year-old John Lawler lost consciousness during a chiropractic appointment for lower backache and died in hospital the next day. An investigation is ongoing as to the cause of death, but the chiropractor, Dr Arleen Scholten, was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and has been released pending enquiries.
‘There are at least 26 welldocumented cases of strokes caused by neck manipulation by chiropractors and I certainly wouldn’t let them near me,’ says David Colquhoun, a pharmacologist and critic of what he calls ‘pseudo-medicine’. He claims the practice is ineffective for backache and is ‘largely a sales scheme and a way of making money’.
He adds: ‘When people go for treatment, the pain is usually at its worst and it would probably ease off on its own anyway.’
Unlike in the UK, where chiropractors are regulated by the General Chiropractic Council, there is no statutory regulation in Ireland. Here, the practice is voluntarily self-regulated by the Chiropractic Association of Ireland.
Peter Dixon, a practising chiropractor for more than 33 years and president of the British Royal College of Chiropractors, explains the treatment process: ‘After a thorough examination, we use a quick, high-velocity thrusting movement in the muscle system around the relevant joint that is stiff or causing pain, which triggers the release of synovial fluid in your joints.
‘This contains gases and causes that popping sound — which then lubricates the joint and helps it to become more mobile.’
BUT what about the possibility of manipulation causing a stroke or even death? ‘With any intervention there is always an element of risk, but it has to be counterbalanced by the experience of the practitioner,’ says Mr Dixon.
Maxine Harley, who went to see a chiropractor for shoulder pain after she had spent days decorating ceilings in her new home, believes chiropractic treatment can cause great harm.
‘My GP offered only pain relief, which didn’t help, so I went to see a chiropractor,’ says Maxine, 60, a psychotherapist. ‘She crunched and pulled my spine a few times while I was lying on a table.
‘When I went back a week later, I told her I was in more pain and she just said it was to be expected as a “healing crisis”. But after the second session, I was in even more agony with twitching and painful tingling all down my right arm.
‘I couldn’t do housework, I hardly slept and painkillers couldn’t even touch it. I remember thinking it would be less painful to cut off my arm.’
But Maxine did go back to the chiropractor and was reassured that more sessions would help.
‘I wasn’t letting her near me again. I wrote to her threatening action and demanding my money back,’ she says.
It took Maxine a visit to an osteopath, six sessions with a registered physiotherapist and exercises for a year for the pain to finally ease.
‘The osteopath who saw me explained that I’d suffered severe nerve damage,’ says Maxine. ‘I have no idea what the chiropractor did, all I know is she caused me so much pain I would never recommend seeing one.’