Letter: Letters: Quack quack

From CLIFFORD THOMPSON

Donald Gould writes, in his review of American Health Quackery (5 September),
that he is amazed at the gullibility of an increasingly educated public.

I studied my ‘quackery’, chiropractic, in America, graduating in 1957.
My daughter, after three good A levels in the sciences, is in the middle
of her five-year course at the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic
in Bournemouth, also studying ‘quackery’.

The Medical Research Council’s investigation, ‘Low back pain of mechanical
origin: randomised comparison of chiropractic and hospital outpatient treatment’,
published in the British Medical Journal, June 1990, came out heavily on
the side of quackery, saying chiropractic treatment was ‘more effective
than hospital outpatient management . . . Introducing chiropractic into
the NHS should be considered’.

Was this an illusion? Or perhaps scientific magic?

Clifford Thompson The Chiropractic Clinic Peterborough, Cambridgeshire