Quote:
Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan
I think that’s rather unfair because most medical doctors wouldn’t be looking at VAS or stroke with a patient that presents with neck pain, so to say the chiropractor delayed care or misdiagnosed/mistreated the patient is to assume that anyone else would have caught it.
Besides, you don’t want to go into misdiagnosis problems because the medical world makes far more frequent and serious errors.
There is a reason that malpractice insurance for chiropractors is a fraction of what it is for medical providers. Overall, the risk is extremely low and very few serious incidents seek chiropractic care, and those that need emergency care are properly referred the vast majority of the time. So you get a couple patients a year? Okay, so statistically speaking that’s insignificant and would be treated as outliers to the main data.
Not to diminish the importance of what you’re talking about, but I feel that putting it in proper context of relative risk is important.
|
You are making a Trump-like false equivalency argument with this "what about MD malpractice/misdiagnosis rate". The proper context here is that misdiagnosis etc. is going to be increased among medical providers because they deal with a significantly higher volume of physical pathology and complex medical problems inherently prone to sub optimal outcomes. MD are often the end of the line after paramedical providers have cherry picked the proverbial low lying fruit, ie. relatively easy problems with none/minimal complications. It's the definition of selection bias, of course there will be a discrepancy in outcomes. Furthermore, when the poop hits the fan, Chiros/naturopaths/etc frequently hide behind the fact they aren't MDs and warned the patient as such in their informed consent telling them to seek proper medical attention if they are concerned. This appears to be somewhat protective against malpractice, ergo the lower insurance rates.
I think its a very flawed assumption MDs aren't at least considering dissection in the back of their mind when assessing a patient for acute neck pain, if not for CYA reasons you already alluded to. There is certainly no shortage of patients sent to the ED from GP's for query dissection, yet I can say that I have never even seen one from a Chiro. I would also strongly argue MDs are much more attuned and competent in recognizing the signs of vertebrobasilar insufficiency compared to a Chiro. I'm not saying MDs do not ever miss them (they certainly do), but at least those patients are already within the healthcare net instead of dwelling in Chiro purgatory until a preventable adverse event occurred.
To label these cases as outliers for purposes of dismissing them is in line with Chiro organization stance, but ultimately a callous attitude to healthcare. You also speak of relative risk, but ignore that I'm just one acute care provider without any clue to the denominator. If I only see 250 patients a year, 2-3 is not a statistically insignificant.