Chiropractors call doctors' criticism 'scaremongering'

Chiropractors and osteopaths use spinal manipulation and massage to treat the misalignment of vertebrae and other bones.

Now the General Chiropractic Council has accused the Royal Society of Medicine of "distortion, sensationalism and scaremongering" over the publication of a research paper suggesting the treatment provided to tens of thousands of people with bad backs every year is useless.

The research was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and claimed there was no evidence that spinal manipulation was more effective than other remedies, such as exercise, but carried a risk of dangerous side-effects, including stroke.

The General Chiropractic Council said the study findings were bunkum and based on flawed research. It said chiropractic is a holistic treatment that involves much more than back cracking, has been approved for use on the NHS for more than a decade and its 2,200 practitioners in Britain are registered to guarantee professional standards.

Scientific spats are nothing new and are usually settled in the pages of the medical journals. But in an unprecedented move, the acting chairman of the General Chiropractic Council, Peter Dixon, has written to the Royal Society of Medicine demanding that it remedies "the damage done".

In the letter to Sir John Lilleyman, the president of the RSM, seen by The Independent, Mr Dixon says the research was "flawed" and lacked "coherent analysis". It failed to specify the risks or establish that spinal manipulation was the cause and amounted to "simple scaremongering". Mr Dixon wrote: "There is a greater likelihood of suffering an adverse event as a result of getting into and out of the bath than there is in undergoing spinal manipulation."

The RSM compounded the matter by issuing an "inaccurate, sensationalist" press release which "confused and scared" patients and the public. "That such coverage was whipped up by the Royal Society of Medicine is incomprehensible," Mr Dixon wrote.

The disputed research paper was a systematic review of 16 previous systematic reviews conducted between 2000 and 2005, incorporating 239 studies. It was conducted by Edzard Ernst, the world's first professor of complementary medicine, at the Peninsula Medical School, Exeter, and a colleague, Peter Canter.