NEW YEAR'S EVE BBQ

Since my flight attendant wife is working on the "Eve", I plan to get the smoker out and BBQ something.  Anything with saturated fat and animal protein.  If it's a cold day, the charcoal will smell even better.

Which brings me to health care and chiropractic.  Can the doctor of chiropractic degree, DC, survive as it is, or morph?  Primary care will be delivered by physician's assistants, PAs, or nurse practitioners, NP, or even morticians and grandmothers.  With young DCs financially in trouble everywhere, what are the options?  The dual degree with DC+ (naturopathy, acupuncture, nursing, physical therapy) will be hard to do because of the time and cost.

I predict the osteopath, the DO, will be the rising star, since their schools can expand without the brakes on by the AMA.  The medical schools are well aware that growth in numbers of MDs also depends on training in residencies, which are not expanding.  That is the show stopper.  The DO schools don't seem to care.

Slow smoking is a good way to ponder the future of healthcare.  Check out my new BBQ smoker!

DRUNK PEOPLE CRACKING THEIR NECKS ON YOUTUBE

I spent entirely too much time today looking at chiropractic videos on YouTube.  My coming article for DC magazine will be about this genre, but I usually don't "name names" in those articles.  But here...ok!

Directions:  Go to Youtube, search for "chiropractic" and any sub-category such as "techniques", back crack, neck crack, adjustment, etc., and watch the fun.  Many DCs want to show how cool they are and attract referrals, even though they show some of the most violent manipulations that I have ever witnessed.  Does this kind of thing get the phone ringing?

Now, for my favorites.  First of all, find the clip from "Friday's" TV show in 1980, starring Michael "N word" Richards of Seinfeld fame, playing a chiropractor.  It's labeled "The Chiropractor"  Get ready to be disrespected.  Next, Dr. Echols in Austin, TX tells us about sexual dysfunction caused by subluxations of the spine, using a good looking gal.  Watching him do the low back distraction "pumping" technique, over and over was very entertaining.

Don't miss "Blonde Chiropractor Gets Cameraman Attention, where the filming guy just can't get the camera off the big boobs of the female DC, wearing a low-cut blouse.  This is on planet chiropractic, which is a consolidator of videos.

Don't miss drunk people cracking people's backs, or their own necks.  Type in "back crack" and make some pop corn.

Tonight my pro-life activist wife and I went to a pro-life banquet and were impressed by the number of babies saved by the web power of Life Commercials.  I realized I need to work at this blog thing to get any traffic and have fun sharing thoughts and opinions.  As I write this, she is searching the blog aggregators that I did not know exist.  Should I join a chiropractic thing, a health thing, an alternative health thing, or something else, to have any fun?  Stay tuned.

The Death of the FCER

The demise of the Foundation of Chiropractic Education and Research seems almost impossible to me.  It's depressing.  FCER was the evidence that chiropractor's cared about research and were serious in supporting it. But, since two-thirds of the money FCER needed each year came from individual DCs, apparently doctors are choosing between paying their dues, or paying other bills, like those for food and shelter.  This does not bode well for our profession.

The membership in professional organizations is low, especially chiropractic. Now, we've lost the one group that should have made any DC proud.  I fear we will now have more representation from the "junk" researchers in the profession, who publish in "junk" journals and come to prejudicial conclusions despite of the outcome of any investigation.  

But what is even more depressing, is the suspicion that DCs are not making more money now than they were eight or none years ago.  At that time, $80 to 85K was the average.  What is it now?  There is no current study to tell us, since we probably don't really want to know. 

You Tube and Blogger Stress

I write an article for the magazine Dynamic Chiropractic, and have been trolling the videos on YouTube and looking through chiropractic blogs.  It is futile to see them all, and probably as futile as trying to see all the pornography sites in the world.  But...WOW!  What entertainment for a chiropractor!.  I plan to pick out a few of my favorites to post here, since my next article in DC will be about this subject.  Maybe my next ten articles could be about them, since there are seminars out there on how to make your blog/video rise to the top of the search engine.  This world is fodder for a lot of fun.  

The challenge with this pursuit is to quit and go to bed.  Reading and viewing stirs up emotions because of the craziness, the blustering, the Tarzan-like chest thumping, as well as the well thought-out material promoting our profession.

Next blog needs to be about the healthcare circus in the USA.

Malpractice at It's Best

The recent quarterly from the chiropractic malpractice insurance company NCMIC, called the Examiner, had an interesting true story of a DC who apparently was an expert on dizziness.  The chiropractor, Dr. "Chin", adjusted the neck of a woman who immediately showed symptoms that included numbness on her left side, had trouble speaking, could not walk because of dizziness, and could not swallow.  I may be confused, but these are not good things to have happen after one's neck is manipulated.  My hunch would be a nasty vertebral artery insult of some kind.

But Dr. Chin didn't get it, although he had some compassion for the patient.  The family called him for advice, and he figured she had a case of "dizziness" and should take some dramamine.  If they didn't have any, he had some at home and he would be happy to drop by with a few pills.  Well, when he got there, the woman was unable to swallow, so reportedly Dr. Chin in a moment of chivalry, forced the pills down her almost paralyzed throat.

Ok, the husband is not convinced things are ok, so he finally gets his wife to the ER, and tests show she has a vertebral artery and a brain stem infarct.  So where was Dr. Chin educated...Auschwitz?!  Why not also bring along some other drug goodies for her, like left-over oxycodon or a hit of meth?  Since he was making a house call, why not adjust her neck again...and maybe again, until he's got it right?

This case is one of the most outlandish I have come across.  The DC must have slept through that course that taught how to think like a five-year old.  "Bad thing happened, call Mommie!", would have been my reaction at age five.  But Dr. "Chin" lucked out when it turned out the patient actually healed up better than anyone would have thought, and surveillance videos showed her as a star in aerobics classes at the local YMCA.

Let this be a lesson:  Don't take drugs over to a patient that you injured by cracking their neck, without calling an ambulance.

FIRST POST FOR THE PARACLETE

Why not have a "blog"?  I failed at Facebook, so why not?  I have hesitated to do so, because of time constraints mostly.  I already write for Dynamic Chiropractic magazine, and that has been therapy enough for me...I thought.  Now, my motivations include self-amusement, including the occasional feed-back of my friends and colleagues, and to read the "posts" of anonymous cowards who will be ridiculing anything most anybody has to say.

Speaking of Facebook, my wife signed me up, (as she did with this blog, actually), and I must say it intimidated me.  I have said, "Ok, I know one can use it like a Cool-Guy, but I'm too busy to be a Cool-Guy." I didn't check it for many days after it went "live", so I was surprised to get my first contact:  the younger sister of a girl in high school that I dated twice, and probably hadn't seen since 1966.  I got the high school annual out, and found her picture.  Sure enough, I remembered her, and was flattered that she contacted me, until I noticed that she had about six or seven-hundred "friends".  I now have two Facebook friends, which include my wife and Jan, the younger sister.  But I somehow enjoy learning when Jan is making potato soup, or taking some kind of personality test.

The next post should probably have something about chiropractic or healthcare...?