Word: spinal
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...almost despite itself, mainstream medicine has started to take notice. Several authoritative studies have confirmed that chiropractic-style spinal manipulation is effective for the treatment of lower-back pain. Leading physicians now openly discuss the technique, and some are even referring their own patients to these once scorned colleagues. Concedes Dr. Shekelle, who directed one of the recent studies: "Their philosophy of disease is totally foreign to us. But for some conditions it sure seems to work...
...reason for turnabout is that spinal manipulation has held up under study, at least for some conditions. In a report released this July by the Rand Corp., a prestigious research organization in Santa Monica, Calif., a panel of leading physicians, osteopaths and chiropractors found that chiropractic-style manipulation was helpful for a major category of patients with lower-back pain: people who are generally healthy but who had developed back trouble within the preceding two or three weeks. Another important study published last summer in the British Medical Journal compared chiropractic treatment with outpatient hospital care that included traction...
Such positive findings come despite the fact that no one is entirely sure how chiropractic manipulation works. Practitioners assert that they are correcting spinal "subluxations," which they describe as misalignments of vertebrae that result in damaging and often painful pressures on nerves in the spinal cord. Because nerves in the cord connect to every organ and body part, such misalignments, they say, can cause problems in the feet, hands and internal organs as well as the back...
...Shonfeld, 40, for instance, was crushed when , an orthopedic surgeon told her she would either have to live with chronic back pain or undergo radical disk surgery, with no guarantee of success. Then she found a chiropractor who, she recalls, "did all kinds of wonderful things." In addition to spinal manipulation, the practitioner served up a potpourri of health-care advice on everything from diet to correct posture and toning up muscles in the stomach and lower back. Now, she says, "my back is almost perfect. My body feels aligned; it feels straight...
...single campus. "It's the linchpin of biomedical research," says Yale medical school dean Leon Rosenberg. Last year alone, NIH scientists or their associates on university campuses began the first federally sanctioned gene therapy on a human, located the cystic fibrosis gene, developed a drug to reduce paralysis from spinal-cord injuries and demonstrated that the drug AZT prolongs life in AIDS patients...