The Chiropractic War on Public Health is still going strong

Over at Chirowatch Terry Polevoy, MD has excellent stuff about chiropractors that encourage their patients to stop vaccinating their children. Tedd Koren and Martha Collins are big supporters of the anti-vaccination movement.

You can read the transcript of a broadcast called Shot in the arm: the chiropractic dispute over childhood vaccinations or you can visit CBC News and watch the video (only 15. minutes and still available).

From the broadcast:

Collins says while her opinion may be not to vaccinate, she can't tell her patients that. But they may understand that's how she thinks.

Collins: And maybe those are the people that are attracted to wellness care anyway.

Wendy Mesley: But maybe there are going to be more and more of these people encouraged by people like you and maybe it will get to a stage where a disease like measles does come back, because kids aren't vaccinated.

Collins: And if it did, what would happen?

Mesley: A lot of kids would die!

Collins: If it did, what would happen as far as - I don’t think it’s going to happen. I really don’t, Wendy. I really don’t.

Collins simply believes vaccination is dangerous, but she has no evidence (watch the movie and you'll realize how she thinks).

Back in Quebec City, Tedd Koren wraps up his presentation to a conference of chiropractors, with a sale pitch: buy his lecture kit for $400 US. Koren says the kit will quickly pay for itself because using it to deliver just a few anti-vaccination lectures will bring in more patients.

He finds six takers - more chiropractors ready to join the anti-vaccination lecture circuit.

Tedd Koren seems to be deeply involved in the anti-vaccination movement and he's earning a lot of money telling other chiro's how to get more patients by joining the anti-vaccination lecture circuit.

Over at CBC they have excellent articles about Vaccine misconceptions and Tips for evaluating vaccination websites.

I decided to do a little Google-search on Tedd Koren:

He was sued by the FTC for false advertising because he is the leading distributor of flyers that chiropractors use to mislead patients into thinking that chiropractic adjustments are substantiated for treating many conditions which are either debunked or unsupported. He circumvented the false advertising issue by fighting back on jurisdictional grounds arguing that his pamphlets were protected as doctor-patient communications not advertising. In that way he made the counterargument that the FTC didn't have the authority to regulate the flyers.

FTC dropped the charges and by doing this they made a victim of him and damaged their own credibility. The courts were used to legalize quackery and debunked methods and he won this case on technicality.

Why would he wish to do that?

He also defended a DC who was eventually convicted of health care fraud in the death of a patient by treating her using "subluxation care" in place of effective medical treatment for epilepsy.

Tedd Koren deserves to be mentioned in the hall of shame.

Updated August 31. 2005