Diving Into the Medicare Data
Recently the Center for Medicare and Medicaid released a bunch of data that various people have been pouring through. Here’s an interesting post pointing out how much Medicare paid for chiropractic treatments and asserting all this is wasted money. I’ve never had a chiropractic treatment, but I know people who have. They say it works, but they also have to keep going back regularly, so it doesn’t work for long. The post says it doesn’t work and cites a few other sources for support. Should Medicare be paying for such alternative medicines and rely on the patients to determine which treatment are best for them?
But wait, you might ask, don’t chiropractors provide pain relief? And don’t they have medical degrees? Well, on the second question, the answer is that they have special Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) degrees, which are given out by just 15 special chiropractic colleges in the U.S. The entire field was invented out of thin air by D.D. Palmer in 1895, and later popularized by his son. In his book-length expose Chiropractic Abuse: An Insider’s Lament, chiropractor Preston Long lists “20 things most chiropractors won’t tell you,” including
- “Chiropractic theory and practice are not based on … knowledge related to health, disease, and health care.
- Many chiropractors promise too much.
- Our education is vastly inferior to that of medical doctors.”
