Chiropractic

“The multiplicity of definitions for science within orthodox medicine made it easier for chiropractors to claim scientific status (S. Martin, 209; cf. Ernst, 546) . . . For chiropractors, scientific knowledge was not acquired by experimental control of variables in a carefully regulated laboratory environment. Instead they examined and treated thousands of patients observed in health and disease. . . . For chiropractors the locus of scientific teaching and research rested not in the laboratory, but at the bedside and in the museum [Martin, 210]. . . . At precisely the moment that elite medical institutions turned away from the museum and embraced the laboratory, chiropractic colleges gloried in their osteological collections [211]. . . . Just as Parisian physicians correlated antemortem and postmortem findings and presented their results as scientific evidence, chiropractors asserted that correlating the clinical status of patients before and after spinal manipulation placed chiropractic on a firm scientific footing. . . . [Chiropractors] argued that the demonstration of a new scientific law that healed the sick was an important contribution to revealing God’s beneficence [212]. . . .The imprecision with which physicians and patients used the term science “provided the intellectual space for chiropractic science to be acceptable, even attractive, to patients. . . . By elaborating a unique conception of science, chiropractors developed an intellectual framework and justification for spinal manipulation that expanded chiropractic beyond an empirical craft and enhanced its professional credibility and stature (226). . . . If the new scientific medicine placed a subtle but distinct wedge of science between doctor and patient, chiropractic science firmly anchored the practitioner to the bedside. The only science chiropractors performed was clinical – observing patients” (227).