Chiropractors and Children

What the research and the paediatricians actually found

Canadian Paediatric Society position statement, 2002

There is no scientific evidence to support the safety and effectiveness of chiropractic in treating non-musculoskeletal conditions in children.

Dr. Linda Spigelblatt · Paediatrics & Child Health 2002; 7(2), 85–89 · Reference No. CP02-01

The statement covers the history of chiropractic, its underlying philosophy, its use in children, the scientific evidence, chiropractors and immunization, safety in children, and the issues it raises for physicians. It was released on 26 February 2002 and reported across the Canadian press the following day.

• Pediatricians warn against chiropractors Brad Evenson · National Post · 27 February 2002 — anti-vaccine chiropractors telling parents vaccines cause disease; unnecessary x-rays; treatments that do not work
• Chiropractic treatment of children unproven, pediatricians warn Prithi Yelaja · Toronto Star · 27 February 2002

The College's reply, March 2002

The CCO answered in the National Post on 9 March 2002, under the heading "Standards of care." Registrar Jo-Ann Willson wrote in response to two pieces — MDs warn of chiropractic peril of 7 February and Pediatricians warn against chiropractors of 27 February — arguing they had not given full consideration to the fact that chiropractors must comply with the regulations governing the profession and with the standards, policies and guidelines set by the College, and that failure to do so may lead to a complaint, an investigation and, when warranted, disciplinary action.

She noted that the Chiropractic Act, 1991 defines the scope of practice and permits the controlled act of spinal adjustment, and that the College had developed a standard setting out what a chiropractor must do before adjusting: make a diagnosis, explain the risks and benefits, and obtain informed consent. Many Ontario chiropractors, she wrote, have family practices that include children, and the College supported the Canadian Chiropractic Association's position that there should be improved dialogue with other health professions about children's care.

And then it disappeared

The 2002 statement was never revised or replaced. It was reaffirmed instead — the journal record carries a 2001–2016 copyright line, and press coverage was still citing it as current CPS policy in 2018 and 2019. Ryan Armstrong, writing in May 2018, recorded that the Society had reaffirmed its position on chiropractic earlier that year, raising concerns about lack of evidence, lack of training, misleading vaccination advice, overuse of x-rays and potential side effects. Its conclusion had softened into an appeal for open and honest conversation with families, in the hope of confining chiropractic to selected musculoskeletal conditions for which there is proof of efficacy.

It is no longer on the CPS website. As of August 2026 the Society's "complementary and alternative medicine" topic index lists exactly one document — a 2019 statement on autism follow-up care. The Community Paediatrics Committee, which authored the chiropractic statement, lists its position statements and practice points with no chiropractic entry among them. The CPS states that authoring groups review their documents at intervals to reaffirm, revise or retire them, and that retired statements are removed from the website.

What fills the vacuum is the industry's own account of itself. In 2019 the Canadian Chiropractic Association published a public statement on paediatric care asserting that chiropractic treatment relieves pain and improves health outcomes for all Canadians including children, that chiropractors follow best practices when treating infants and children, and that available evidence suggests moderately positive or favourable outcomes in paediatric populations — while conceding in the same breath that the evidence for paediatric conditions is limited. That is now the loudest Canadian voice on the question, and it goes unanswered.

Regulators elsewhere moved in the opposite direction. An Australian review led to recommendations that spinal manipulation not be provided to children under 12 for general wellness or non-musculoskeletal conditions, and the Chiropractic Board of Australia enforced an interim policy prohibiting chiropractic spinal manipulation in children under two. Canada has no federal equivalent. The closest thing is the College of Chiropractors of British Columbia's 2019 ban on Webster-technique pregnancy claims — one province, one technique.

CCOHTA systematic review — spinal manipulation for infantile colic

The Canadian Coordinating Office for Health Technology Assessment reviewed the trial evidence for manipulating infants with colic. Colic affects up to 17% of families enough that they seek advice, and excessive crying can in some cases trigger physical abuse — so the stakes for a genuinely effective treatment would be real. The review applied Jadad scoring, checked whether randomisation sequences were concealed from investigators, and ran an intention-to-treat analysis.

• Spinal manipulation for infantile colic — full textPDF Husereau D, Clifford T, Aker P, Leduc D, Mensinkai S · CCOHTA

The admission buried in the promotional copy

One chiropractor's own page on ear infections concedes the point directly: chiropractic has historically demonstrated tremendous results with children and ear infections, he writes — however, there are no clinical trials or double-blinded studies demonstrating cause and effect, so detractors claim the results are anecdotal and unsupportable. That is not a rebuttal. That is the finding.

Two deaths in the record, and two colleges with no position

Vohra et al., Pediatrics, January 2007

The most important paediatric safety review on this subject was led by a Canadian, published in the American Academy of Pediatrics' own journal, and has never been superseded.

Dr. Sunita Vohra MD FRCPC MSc, of the CARE Program in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Alberta and the Stollery Children's Hospital, working with Bradley C. Johnston, Kristie Cramer and Kim Humphreys, searched eight major electronic databases from inception to June 2004, in any language, for any primary investigation of spinal manipulation reporting adverse events in patients aged 18 or under.

Their conclusion was carefully worded and has been widely misread in both directions. Serious adverse events may be associated with paediatric spinal manipulation; neither causation nor incidence rates can be inferred from observational data; and a prospective population-based active surveillance study is required to properly assess the possibility of rare but serious events. The authors noted that although spinal manipulation is widely used on children, paediatric safety data are virtually non-existent.

That surveillance study has still not been done. Nineteen years on, the profession continues to cite the absence of data as evidence of safety — the absence that Vohra's team identified and asked someone to fix.

The response tells you as much as the paper

The June 2007 issue of Pediatrics carried three separate letters attacking the review — from Rosner, from Katz and from Brassard — with a reply from the authors. The International Chiropractic Pediatric Association published its own rebuttal by research director Joel Alcantara, arguing the paper showed naiveté about the range of techniques in use. The Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research responded as well. A finding of two dead children produced a literature review of the finding.

• Vohra S, Johnston BC, Cramer K, Humphreys K. "Adverse events associated with pediatric spinal manipulation: a systematic review." Pediatrics 2007;119(1):e275–e283. doi:10.1542/peds.2006-1392 PMID 17178922. Assessed for the York DARE database as a generally well-conducted review whose conclusions are likely to be reliable.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has no policy

Asked in 2022 about the growth of infant chiropractic on social media, an AAP spokesman said the Academy has no policy on chiropractic care for infants or toddlers. He pointed instead to a line in an AAP clinical report: high-quality evidence supporting the effectiveness of spinal manipulation for non-musculoskeletal concerns is lacking, especially in infants and children, for whom the risks of adverse events may be the highest because of immature stability of the spine.

That is a real finding, and it is the closest thing American paediatrics has to a position. But it sits inside a clinical report rather than standing as a statement, which means it carries no weight with a regulator and generates no press.

Ernst in Pediatrics, 2008

Professor Edzard Ernst wrote to the same journal the following year under the title "Chiropractic for Children," setting out five examples drawn from chiropractic organisations' own published statements — claims that adjustment helps colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying; that natural childbirth can affect an infant's spine; that colic, unusual crying, poor appetite, ear infections or erratic sleeping can be signs of spinal distress. He made the point that the profession's own literature leaves no doubt that its organisations believe infants routinely require spinal adjustment.

May 2018: what the paediatricians actually said

Sharon Kirkey's first article on the subject ran on 8 May 2018 in the National Post and across the Postmedia chain, including the Sudbury Star on 9 May. It is the most useful single piece of Canadian journalism on paediatric chiropractic, because it put named clinicians on the record and made the regulators answer.

Her framing was careful. Chiropractors describe infant adjustments as gentle — no popping, cracking or crunching, with pressure applied to a single vertebra using about the force you would use to test a tomato for ripeness, as the profession likes to put it. The concern she reported was not that force, but the claims wrapped around it: that as many as 80 per cent of newborns need an adjustment for the trauma of being born, that babies experience nerve interference or a misaligned cervical spine from birth even after a caesarean, and that treatment should begin as soon as possible. Some practitioners went further, claiming manipulation could peel away the symptoms of autism and help non-verbal toddlers speak.

Dr. Douglas Mack, an assistant clinical professor at McMaster University and a paediatric allergy specialist, supplied the line that became the headline. His point was measured — he said it need not be an "us against them" matter — but that when chiropractors overstate what lies outside their realm, it borders on the fraudulent.

He also supplied the harm. Mack has treated children whose families were told by a chiropractor that a misaligned spine was the cause of their nut allergy and that treatment would let them outgrow it. They tried the nuts, and the children had severe reactions.

The claims Kirkey catalogued run well past colic: constipation, ear infections, digestive disorders, hyperactivity and bedwetting; that children under chiropractic care are superior in health to those who are not; that adjustment helps learning disorders and dyslexia; that it relieves food and other allergies.

Who else was on the record

• Dr. Clay Travis Jones, a paediatrician at Newton-Wellesley Hospital outside Boston, said there is no evidence whatsoever that 80 per cent of newborns suffer birth trauma. He described the scary memes showing an obstetrician or midwife pulling a baby out by the neck, and said no legitimate evidence supports the idea that any appreciable percentage of babies suffer subluxations or any injury that adjustment could address. He called them scare tactics.
• The American Academy of Pediatrics warned that children may face very rare but serious complications from spinal manipulation.
• The Canadian Paediatric Society — then still holding a live position — recommended that parents be made aware there is no substantiated evidence for the theory of subluxated vertebrae as a cause of illness in children.
• Samuel Homola, DC, writing in Bioethics in 2016, went furthest: any attempt to manipulate the immature, cartilaginous spine of a neonate or small child to correct a putative chiropractic subluxation should be regarded as dangerous and unnecessary.
• Ryan Armstrong, PhD, a biomedical engineer and consumer health advocate investigating chiropractic claims, said the most worrying thing he finds is the complete disregard for evidence and scientific truth, and that the regulatory colleges are not doing enough to sanction members who breach their own standards of practice. He was careful to distinguish the responsible majority — the evidence-based practitioners, he noted, are not the ones on social media making absurd claims about their clinics.

Canada had roughly 8,500 licensed chiropractors at the time, regulated in every province.

May 2018: the CCA Chair replies, in his own name

Ten days after Kirkey's first article, the National Post published a letter under the heading "Chiropractors respond." It was signed by Dr. David Peeace, Chair of the Canadian Chiropractic Association, Toronto. Unlike the corporate statement that would follow in 2019, this one carries a name.

Peeace said the association was extremely disappointed in Kirkey's depiction of the profession, and accused her of misrepresenting what he called an outdated 2007 study. That study is Vohra — the review described above, with its fourteen injuries, nine of them serious, and four dead children.

His objection to it was that neither causation nor incidence rates can be inferred from it, that it included non-chiropractic treatments in patients up to age 18, and that only one patient in the study was under five.

He did not dispute the deaths. His response to a review reporting two children killed directly and two more dead of meningitis after delayed care was to observe that the age distribution of the cases was not what a reader might assume.

What he affirmed

The rest of the letter set out the association's positive case: that chiropractic is appropriate and clinically indicated in primary paediatric care for a range of musculoskeletal conditions, naming torticollis, muscular and biomechanical imbalances, and developmental physical delays involving MSK deficits; that chiropractors refer to physicians or the emergency room based on their diagnosis, as physicians refer to chiropractic or physiotherapy; that treatment of an infant is gentle, diagnostically guided and age-appropriate; and — the claim that matters — that infants treated within the chiropractic scope of practice enjoy successful outcomes, supported by newer research showing serious adverse events in infants and children are rare.

The reply the National Post did not print

Ryan Armstrong wrote a response and sent it to the paper's editors. When it became clear they would not run it, he published it himself on 23 May 2018.

His argument was that Canada's largest chiropractic advocacy organisation had answered in a manner one would expect of politicians rather than registered health professionals — ignoring the central problem and defending indefensible practices. He allowed that there may be a role for chiropractors in musculoskeletal conditions in children, while noting it is not well established in the literature, and pointed out that this was never the issue: Kirkey's piece was about outlandish claims concerning serious medical conditions outside chiropractors' scope and expertise, and about the birth-trauma premise.

On the evidence, his position was that no credible evidence indicates spinal manipulation for any infantile condition, and that even where the risk of serious harm is low, unnecessary procedures with no demonstrated benefit and documented risk have no place in healthcare. He added a risk the profession rarely addresses: a young child presenting with a musculoskeletal complaint may have a serious underlying cause requiring medical evaluation beyond a chiropractor's scope.

He was careful to head off a "not all chiropractors" response, acknowledging real progress in the profession and the willingness of public health experts to extend an olive branch to responsible practitioners. His terms were non-negotiable: drop the pseudoscience.

One further point of his belongs here. The CCA is not a public health organisation and not a regulator. It is an advocacy body, whose stated mission was for chiropractors to become an integral part of every Canadian's healthcare team by 2023. It has, to its credit, accepted vaccination as an effective public health measure lying outside the scope of chiropractic practice — a low bar for a national health organisation, and one some chiropractic regulators have failed to clear.

• Chiropractors respond — letter from Dr. David Peeace, Chair, Canadian Chiropractic Association National Post · 16 May 2018 · via PressReader
• Chiropractic Pediatrics Vs. Reality (Part I) Ryan Armstrong, PhD · Post-Truth Health · 23 May 2018 — the response the National Post declined to publish, with his own commentary

The CCA answers a journalist — and concedes the central claim

On 2 July 2019 the National Post published Sharon Kirkey's article "This. Hurts. Babies": Doctors alarmed at weekend course teaching chiropractors how to adjust newborn spines, with an accompanying video. Three days later the Canadian Chiropractic Association issued a public statement saying the piece misled Canadians about the value and practice of chiropractic care.

The courses were run by the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association — the same body whose birth-trauma material is quoted further down this page. Kirkey's reporting noted the contrast with Australia, where regulators were moving to protect infants from unnecessary adjustment, while in Canada the training was expanding.

What the course actually was

The ICPA's own page for the seminar sets out the details, and they are not in dispute. The course is titled The Essentials of Chiropractic: Adjusting the Infant and Education in the Perinatal Period, delivered over a weekend by two co-instructors: Armand Rossi, DC teaching part one, an introduction to spinal assessment and low-force adjusting techniques for infants and children; and Ian Shtulman, DC, DACCP teaching part two on educating parents in perinatal practice. It is one of sixteen modules — fourteen seminars and two research projects — making up the ICPA's certification series.

Attendees were told what to bring. A baby doll: not a Barbie, too small, and not a Cabbage Patch Kid, which has no neck. The recommended model was Mon Bébé. Also a portable table.

And they are still running — checked August 2026

Toronto is no longer an occasional stop. It is one of seventeen permanent ICPA seminar locations worldwide, alongside Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Minneapolis, Overland Park, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Spartanburg, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur, Toulouse and a live-streamed option. It is the only Canadian location currently carrying scheduled seminars.

A Vancouver seminar series page also remains on the ICPA site, retaining its own listing and photograph, but showing no seminars or events at present. Vancouver hosted the October 2019 dates reported at the time. Whether the series has been discontinued or is simply between schedules, the page is still there, and the certification remains open to any Canadian chiropractor through the Toronto series, the live-streamed option or the online catalogue.

What the 2026 catalogue now contains

The programme has expanded well beyond the two-part course Kirkey reported. The current listing includes twelve-hour modules in cranial evaluation and adjusting for infants and children; cranial distortion patterns attributed to birth trauma; brain-based analysis and adjusting for neurodevelopmental challenges, which opens by citing autism rates of one in 36 and tells registrants to bring their dolls; advanced techniques in paediatric neurodiversity for special-needs children; perinatal neuroimmunology covering immunology concepts and controversies; the practical neurology of the Vertebral Subluxation Complex; and functional assessment teaching that correcting subluxations helps restore brain balance.

One module, Measure what Matters, trains practitioners to use thermography, heart rate variability and surface electromyography to analyse subluxation patterns in infants and children, naming specific commercial instruments.

• ICPA Toronto Seminar Series Retrieved 15 August 2026 — dates, venue, instructor, fee and the list of Canadian regulators granting CE credit
• ICPA — All Courses Retrieved 15 August 2026 — the full 2026 catalogue
• ICPA Pediatric Certification (CACCP) Retrieved 15 August 2026 — the 200-hour programme structure
• ICPA Vancouver Seminar Series Retrieved 15 August 2026 — listed but currently showing no scheduled seminars

The credential, and what it is worth

The ICPA's Pediatric Certification is a 200-hour programme — seven courses completed through Perinatal Certification plus thirteen further paediatric modules — leading to the designation CACCP, Certified by the Academy Council on Chiropractic Pediatrics. Completing it establishes eligibility to become a Diplomate, DACCP. The International Chiropractors Association runs a separate diplomate stream of 300 hours or more.

Other providers sell shorter routes. One online programme offers a Certification in Chiropractic Pediatrics in 24 hours.

The CCA's reply is condescending in tone — it extends Kirkey the benefit of the doubt and suggests she must be unaware of what Canada's two chiropractic colleges teach. But read past that, because the statement gives away three things the profession's own advertising does not.

Take the first of those seriously. The birth-trauma premise — that passage through the birth canal subluxates the newborn spine and interferes with the nervous system — is the foundation of the entire paediatric chiropractic enterprise. It is the claim on the Ottawa clinic's page quoted in the marketing section below, in the ICPA's own birth-trauma literature, and in the Activator material. The national association disavowed it in July 2019. Chiropractors across Canada are still advertising it.

The third concession corroborates what this page says about Ontario. When a chiropractor hangs a weekend-course certificate on the wall and calls themselves a paediatric specialist, it is not only the CCO's standard they are breaching — their own national association says the specialty does not exist here.

What the CCA offered in its defence

The claims are checkable, and worth recording. The CCA says paediatrics and pre- and ante-natal care are an integral part of the four-year curriculum, covering embryology, genetics, congenital and developmental defects and skeletal maturation; that students complete over 50 hours of coursework in paediatric diagnosis and management and antenatal care; that a mandatory one-year supervised internship follows; and that the Canadian Chiropractic Examining Board's clinical competency examinations include paediatrics and must be passed before licensure. On evidence, it offers the same hedge as ever — available evidence suggests moderately positive or favourable outcomes in paediatric populations, while the evidence for paediatric conditions is limited. Its two supporting citations are Hawk et al. (JMPT 2016) and Todd, Carroll et al. (JMPT 2015), both in the profession's own journal.

The citation that contradicts the statement

The CCA's evidence claim rests on two references, both in the profession's own journal. The first is the Hawk, Schneider, Vallone and Hewitt best-practices consensus (JMPT 2016). That paper contains a sentence the CCA did not quote: the scientific evidence for the effectiveness and efficacy of chiropractic care and spinal manipulation in the treatment of children is not plentiful or definitive.

So the document cited to establish moderately positive or favourable paediatric outcomes says the opposite in its own text. A consensus paper records what a group of practitioners agree on. It is not evidence that what they agree on works.

The second reference, Todd, Carroll et al. (JMPT 2015), is a review of adverse events. It is cited as reassurance, but a review that cannot causally link chiropractic care to paediatric deaths with certainty is not a finding of safety — deaths and serious injuries appear in the literature it surveys. Read it alongside Vohra above.

• "This. Hurts. Babies": Doctors alarmed at weekend courses teaching chiropractors how to adjust newborn spines Sharon Kirkey · National Post · 2 July 2019
• "Research is ongoing and growing": Chiropractic leaders defend manipulating newborn spines Sharon Kirkey · National Post · July 2019 — the follow-up, headlined with the CCA's own phrase
• Pediatricians alarmed by chiropractic treatments for babies Sharon Kirkey · Postmedia News · Sudbury Star, 9 May 2018 — the chain version of the 8 May National Post article, which ran under the fuller "border on the fraudulent" headline
• Public Statement on Chiropractic & Pediatric Care in Canada Canadian Chiropractic Association, Toronto, 5 July 2019 · media contact listed as Tari Stork, Director of Public Affairs
• The Essentials of Chiropractic: Adjusting the Infant and Education in the Perinatal Period ICPA course page — instructors, the baby-doll requirement, and the 2019 schedule including Toronto and Vancouver
• Chiropractic Pediatrics Vs. Reality (Part I) Ryan Armstrong, PhD · Post-Truth Health · 23 May 2018 — the response the National Post did not publish
• A Canadian journalist calls out pediatric chiropractic again Clay Jones, MD · Science-Based Medicine · 12 July 2019 — a paediatrician's line-by-line reading of the CCA statement

What happened when regulators actually looked

Australia: a two-week-old held upside down by the ankles

In 2018 a Melbourne chiropractor posted a video using a spring-loaded Activator device on the spine of a two-week-old baby suspended upside down by the ankles. The video reached the public, the medical associations and eventually the politicians. The Victorian health minister commissioned Safer Care Victoria to conduct an independent review of spinal manipulation in children, with a panel of paediatric experts drawn from across the health professions.

Two details from that fortnight are worth holding onto. Board chair Wayne Minter said there had been no evidence of serious harm to infants from chiropractic care in Australia — in a country where children had required medical care after treatment, including one with a spinal fracture. And the ministers' position was blunter than the Board's: there had been no basis for the prohibition to have been lifted in the first place. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and other medical bodies opposed the reversal, noting that two reviews had found no evidence supporting the practice.

British Columbia looked, and found nothing

The Canadian jurisdiction that came closest to following Australia was British Columbia, and its answer went the other way. In July 2019 the College of Chiropractors of British Columbia ordered a review of spinal manipulative therapy in children under 10, its board stating it was not satisfied that an exhaustive review of the research had been completed. The review was to include a scan of policies in other jurisdictions, an examination of what chiropractic education programmes teach about treating infants and children, and an audit of BC chiropractors' advertising for claims outside their scope of practice, including those aimed at children.

The independent rapid review was carried out by Melissa Corso, Carol Cancelliere, Silvano Mior, Anne Taylor-Vaisey and Pierre Côté, using WHO rapid-review methodology, searching MEDLINE, CINAHL and the Index to Chiropractic Literature from 1990 to August 2019, and critically appraising 33 studies. It was published in Chiropractic & Manual Therapies in February 2020.

In early 2020 the CCBC board concluded that treatment of children with spinal manipulative therapy does not present a significant risk to the public, declined to pursue regulatory action, and said it would continue to monitor.

The same college had, months earlier, banned its registrants from advertising the Webster technique for turning breech babies. One regulator, two questions, two opposite answers, within a year.

The strongest evidence the profession has

Fairness requires noting the best paediatric trial in the field, because it is better than anything offered for colic or ear infections. A Danish randomised, single-blind trial ran from November 2015 to August 2020 in one chiropractic clinic and one paediatric specialty practice, enrolling 199 children aged 7 to 14 who had at least one headache episode a week for six months. All received standard advice; the active group received chiropractic spinal manipulation and the control group a sham procedure over four months. The manipulation group reported significantly fewer days with headache and a better global perceived effect.

Note what that trial is and is not. It is about recurrent headache in school-age children — a musculoskeletal-adjacent complaint in patients old enough to report outcomes. It says nothing about adjusting a two-week-old for colic, about ear infections, about asthma, or about anything the subluxation model claims. When a chiropractor cites "the evidence" for paediatric care, this is roughly the whole of it.

Pregnancy, breech presentation and the Webster technique

Chiropractors who have taken a weekend course say they are qualified to turn a fetus in the third trimester. They are not, and telling a patient otherwise breaches their own practice standards. In some jurisdictions the regulators look the other way.

Larry Webster invented the procedure and spent years lecturing thousands of chiropractors on it. His appearance on ABC's 20/20 with John Stossel in 1994 was an indictment of the entire industry, and the chiropractic response was immediate.

A Kingston case, published by the chiropractor herself

In a May 2002 newsletter, an Ontario chiropractor described a midwife referring a 34-week pregnant woman to her for "the adjusting protocol to turn her 34-week-old baby boy." She wrote that the midwife reported the baby in the proper position after three adjustments, and that because the technique uses the innate intelligence of mother and baby there is no risk. She cited Webster's own research as showing the technique successful in 97% of adverse presentations.

Questions put to the Association of Ontario Midwives and the CCO

• How can a midwife refer patients to a chiropractor for obstetrical intervention at all?
• Is that midwife liable if the baby or the mother is harmed?
• What are the AOM's standards of practice on this? The Midwifery Act, 1991 defines midwifery as care during normal pregnancy, labour and the post-partum period, and spontaneous normal vaginal deliveries.
• Is midwives' malpractice reimbursed by the Province of Ontario?
• Would the Province be liable in the case of a midwife who referred a patient to a chiropractor?
• Are Ontario universities teaching midwives to refer to chiropractors instead of physicians?

What the promotional material claims

A canned presentation site out of Cary, North Carolina states that manipulative therapy normalizes the functions of the pituitary, adrenal, ovarian and placental systems, shortens labour by 50 to 60 percent, lessens medication requirements by at least 50 percent, makes postpartum depression a rarity, and is of great value in normalizing body function in women with toxemia. There is no evidence for any of it.

Anti-vaccine nights, and the standard that was supposed to stop them

As part of their pediatric practices, many chiropractors run anti-vaccine evenings, inviting whole families and their children to watch videos about the harm the medical establishment supposedly inflicts on their loved ones.

CBC Marketplace, January 2004

Wendy Mesley's programme filmed Tedd Koren selling CDs and workbooks in Quebec City, and an Ontario chiropractor who had publicly claimed to revert a third-trimester breech presentation and who told parents their babies did not need their shots. Asked what would happen if there were a measles outbreak in her own city, she was unable to answer. Her website, presented as offering balanced vaccine information, had ten of fourteen links pointing to material hostile to vaccination.

The strongest part of the broadcast was the interview with chiropractor and PhD student Dr. Jason Busse, lead author of a CMAJ paper chronicling the growth of anti-vaccine attitudes among CMCC students.

The following day the same chiropractor used her newsletter to attack the programme and to promote another anti-vaccine chiropractor, Tim O'Shea.

CCO Standard of Practice S-015

The CCO passed a new immunization standard in February 2004, nearly identical to the one it replaced, which had never been effectively enforced. The College's own position is that a chiropractor's website is an extension of their office — so a practitioner barred from arguing against vaccination in the treatment room is equally barred from doing it online. Anyone promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric in a professional capacity can lose their licence.

• Standards of Practice for Immunization — proposed S-015PDF
• CCO newsletter transcript
• Transcript of CBC Marketplace 20 January 2004
• Tedd Koren letter, 23 September 1998
• Anti-vaccine nights — the Kulhay file
• The full anti-vaccine section

Health Canada, 1996

At the 2nd Canadian National Immunization Conference in Toronto in December 1996 — "Immunizing for Health: Achieving Our National Goals" — the opposition movement inside chiropractic was already on the agenda. The comment recorded at the time was that there seems to be an aberrant wing of chiropractors, and that although there is a disciplinary process within the profession, it does not appear to reach them. Nearly three decades later that assessment still stands.

What a regulator's charge sheet actually looks like

A Hollywood, California pediatric chiropractor was accused by the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners of a long list of violations of the Chiropractic Act. The charges are useful because they itemise, in a regulator's own words, the claims that pediatric chiropractic makes routinely and that no Canadian college has ever pursued.

• California Board of Chiropractic Examiners — chargesPDF 26 October 2006

A footnote on the harassment campaign

In August 2007 the CPSO and the Canadian Medical Association's ethics office received a complaint against Dr. Polevoy that purported to come from this same practitioner. It was substantially the same complaint sent to the same bodies in August 2000, as part of a campaign organised by Tim Bolen. Whether she sent it or whether someone forged her email address was never established; an email asking her directly went unanswered. Those of us who have been targets of that campaign have reason to keep a record of it.

Who pays for it

In April 2002 Manitoba's NDP government announced it was banning all government payments for pediatric treatment by chiropractors. The provincial chiropractic association's president reacted furiously.

• Manitoba tries to ban pediatric insurance payments Winnipeg · 27 April 2002

Ontario continued to fund pediatric chiropractic through a publicly funded health system already under strain. The performance chiropractors gave on CBC Marketplace did more to make the case for cutting that funding than any critic could.

Marketing to parents

A trade article on pediatric public relations strategy sets out the reasoning plainly. Mothers refrain from smoking, alcohol and caffeine in pregnancy — so why, it asks, do they wean infants onto soda and chips, and why do they choose chiropractic care for their children yet continue to vaccinate them? Its conclusion is that chiropractors must work twice as hard to take media opportunities that shift families from the allopathic model to the chiropractic lifestyle, and it points readers to a foundation offering media spokesperson training.

What the promotional pages tell parents

An Ottawa-area clinic advises that because significant spinal trauma can occur at birth, many parents have their newborns checked for the Vertebral Subluxation Complex, and that learning to walk or ride a bicycle can cause spinal problems. Childhood complaints dismissed as growing pains, it says, can often be traced to the spine, and the unseen damage is the unique domain of a chiropractor.

An Activator page states that childhood is the best time to begin chiropractic care because most conditions are easily and effectively corrected and children heal faster than adults. It makes no mention of the anti-immunization bias running through the same programmes.

The International Chiropractic Pediatric Association argues that birth trauma is under-publicised and therefore under-treated, and that manual treatment of birth-trauma injuries is well within current chiropractic practice.

A Pennsylvania "natural pediatrics" centre treats children with magnatherm machines, low-level laser therapy, cleansing enemas, chlorophyll inhalations, "Vitamin F", manipulation, ground-up carrots in a bag applied to swollen glands for mumps, and mummy wraps for measles — while using the US military caduceus as its logo.

A Durban newspaper ran a story headlined that a quick click beats colic cries, describing a baby settled by an adjustment to the C2 region, "an area connected to the digestive system." The article conceded that until recently the use of chiropractic for colic had been based mainly on hearsay.

How television covered it

ABC Australia, Lateline — 2008

Chiropractors defend the treatment of infants and children. Roughly eight minutes, and one of the best reports on the subject: interviews with academic chiropractors in Australia alongside critics of pediatric chiropractic, plus a neurologist on chiropractic strokes. Several of the academics stated that recent graduates are all evidence-based and called for investigation of any Australian chiropractor promoting otherwise.

ABC Nightline, 2 March 2009 — "Crack! Kids Head to the Chiropractor"

The programme provided no evidence that the treatment works, and the rebuttal was weak. It was full of testimonials from a New York chiropractor's own patients.

KDKA, Pittsburgh

A poster chiropractor says he treats 50 to 100 children a week. Why parents pay for this, and why insurers pay for it, are fair questions — as is why the segment played like an infomercial on a CBS flagship station.

CBC

Two Ontario chiropractors explained that babies are "mostly cartilage," and that pediatric chiropractic has a bad name because the colleges do not teach it.

• KDKA segment — Richard Rafferty
• Astrid Trim and Claudia Anrig on the CBC
• CBC Marketplace transcript 20 January 2004

Chiropractors against chiropractors

Samuel Homola, DC — how subluxation theory threatens public health

Homola, a retired chiropractor and author of a dozen books, argues that many chiropractors treat patients on the theory that correcting vertebral subluxations restores and maintains health, and that the management of infants and children by subluxation-based chiropractors who reject immunization and antibiotics is especially alarming. If the profession fails to abandon the false premise on which it is built, he writes, it will remain controversial and parts of chiropractic treatment will continue to threaten public health.

Colley, Morgan and Haas — reply on vaccination

Fred Colley PhD MPH, Lon Morgan DC DABCO and Mitchell Haas DC MA: no vaccine is 100% safe or 100% effective, but immunization has cut the incidence of numerous high-morbidity childhood diseases to under 1% of former levels in many countries, eradicated smallpox, and saved countless millions of lives. Some members of the profession remain unwilling to accept this despite overwhelming evidence.

L.A. Chotkowski, MD

Chiropractic: The Greatest Hoax of the Century — his second book on the subject, arguing that chiropractic has flourished essentially unchallenged for a hundred years.

• Chiropractors talk about chiropractors
• Neck manipulation and stroke — the adult side of the same philosophy

Source documents held on this site

If this is happening in your community

Is there evidence of rampant abuse by so-called pediatric chiropractors in North America? A look at the websites, at park benches, and at Yellow Pages advertising suggests these are not isolated examples.

• Ask what condition is being treated and on what evidence. There are no clinical trials supporting chiropractic for colic, ear infections, asthma, bedwetting or ADHD.
• Check the credential. In Ontario the CCO does not recognise pediatrics as a specialty, so a chiropractor advertising as a pediatric specialist is breaching the standard.
• Do not accept vaccine advice from a chiropractor. Under S-015 a chiropractor promoting anti-vaccine material in a professional capacity can lose their licence — including on their own website.
• If your child needs antibiotics, they need antibiotics. An ear infection treated by spinal manipulation instead of medicine is how two children in the case above lost their hearing and their safety margin.
• Report it. Contact your provincial college and your insurer. Regulators act on what reaches them.

File a complaint — provincial directory E-mail a pediatric report

Related pages

• The Bad Chiro Files Named practitioners from this page — including the California case, the Webster and Bagnell promoters, Tedd Koren, Rafferty, Trim and Anrig — are indexed there
• Neck manipulation and stroke
• Anti-vaccine chiropractors
• Dubious Ontario chiropractic sites
• The Lana Dale Lewis inquest
• Chiropractors talk about chiropractors
• Why you need ChiroWatch
• Bulletins — latest news
• Past headlines
• Search chiropractic fraud news