Over the past year research reports and stories in the press and media have appeared about the issue of chiropractic neck adjustments causing strokes. A recent study published in the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research Vol. 4 No. 3 adds further evidence that, despite what some biased researchers purport, chiropractic is indeed very safe.

The study titled Stroke and Chiropractic: A Review of the Literature was written by Ari Cohn B.S., D.C. a private practitioner from New Jersey and a graduate of the University of Bridgeport College of Chiropractic. According to Dr. Cohn there were a number of flaws in the literature relative to the supposed dangers of neck adjustments. These included clumping all manipulation together and calling it chiropractic. According to Dr. Cohn: "In the literature there is a lack of distinction between professions and different styles and techniques of manual procedures, adjusting and manipulating. Medical doctors, osteopaths, physical therapists and chiropractors have different levels of expertise and levels of training in the area of spinal manipulation and adjustment. Although chiropractors perform approximately 94% of all spinal adjustments it is misrepresentation to include statistics of injuries caused by other professionals, and even non-professionals and refer to the procedures as chiropractic in nature when clearly they are not."

Other issues involve blaming the cause of a stroke on chiropractic based on the temporal relationship to an adjustment. "Just because a person had an adjustment a day or two before their stroke does not mean the adjustment caused the stroke. I bet those people also drank water the day before the stroke but no one is going to say the water caused the stroke" stated Dr. Cohn.

Interestingly Dr. Cohn reviewed the statistics regarding stroke in the general population versus in the chiropractic patient population and showed that the incidence is actually lower in those people under chiropractic care. He pointed out "the statistics might indicate that perhaps we are actually preventing strokes in our patients as opposed to the other way around." Dr. Cohn's review also compares the risk of common medical procedures to the risk of stroke from cervical adjustment and says "medicine should clean up its own backyard before looking at ours." Dr. Cohn pointed out that "medical procedures have an inherent risk that the public for some strange reason seems to accept without any question. Even a simple venipuncture is many times more dangerous than the risk of stroke from a chiropractic adjustment. These are obvious flaws in logic that people are just not seeing."