April 2006

FCER responds to British study

The Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research (FCER) finds the biases in the British study published in the April 1, 2006, issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine are apparent, rendering the negative “findings” little more than the authors’ personal opinions.

The authors of the study wrote that they found no convincing data to support claims that spinal manipulation is effective. (Chiropractic Economics’ coverage of the study, titled “Controversial British study causes uproar among DCs,” can be found at www.chiroeco.com/news/2006/March.)

The FCER response said, “This study is so far from what would be considered a methodical and robust systematic review without bias, as to render it highly suspect if not meaningless. Its methods of analyses have not been validated but rather reveal the authors’ own carelessness — if not outright distortion — of the literature which it cites.

“Many of its glaring defects are ones that the authors attempt to criticize in other work. It fails to grasp how the hypotheses and methods of analysis in the reviews that it cites are bound to deliver differing conclusions, such that Ernst and Canter [the authors] go out of their way to criticize the positive findings of a single chiropractic author while overlooking their own consistently negative findings for chiropractic, which appear in no less than 25 percent of the reviews that they include in their discussion.

“Finally, the authors fail to recognize the major flaws in several of the primary sources of data which comprise the systematic reviews under scrutiny in this research.”

FCER went to say, “In lacking many of the elements required for a meaningful presentation of the evidence required for supporting treatment alternatives, this current report should not be considered worthy of guiding a clinical decision. As such, the glaring weaknesses of the report only serve to undermine the public’s confidence in science as a means to inform health policy.”

Source: The Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research, www.FCER.org

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