Perfect example of innate is this...what heals a cut on your hand? The bandaid? The anti-bacterial cream? Nope. Nothing. Cut the hand of a corpse, does it heal if a bandaid is thrown on it? Nope. Its that 'life force' we have. That may all seem like voodoo weird bullshit, but stop and think about it. I am not talking about God or religion here, just something that all living creatures have. Once that 'thing' is gone, you are dead.
Your words only reinforce my point, which is that certain aspects of chiropractic amount to metaphysically extravagant doctrines with no basis in science. The tandem of functional and molecular biology is more than sufficient for explaining the mechanisms that produce anything and everything the body does, from its ability to self repair to its possessing the simple property of 'being alive'. No magical life force need be posited; in fact, to do is bad
philosophy, let alone bad science. This sort of high school-level philosophizing is a major liability for your craft.
Prominent MD's are saying it.
Many more prominent MD's are saying it is not. Therefore, whether your claim is an appeal to popularity or to authority, it doesn't work. It seems to me that we shouldn't rely on either of these methods to assess chiropractic's efficacy anyway.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2050630/
You already pointed out why this study does nothing to demonstrate that SMT in particular is effective in treating migraines: literally
any treatment usually succeeds in reducing migraine frequency. In addition, the study is uncontrolled, meaning it does nothing to account for the placebo effect.
Why are you posting research that does nothing to advance your argument?
Lastly, you keep talking about the placebo effect. No matter if you talk chiropractic or allopathic medicine, there is a placebo effect. Anything from anti-depressants, meds for chronic fatigue, arthritis pain, and even cancer have individuals that respond to a placebo. You can not throw chiropractic in there with a negative light and not look at the facts surrounding medications as well.
Again, fixing upon specific features of the medical industry does nothing to vindicate chiropractic. Imagine a possible world where the medical industry's treatments are complete crap. You would be able to point this out all you like and it would do precisely
nothing to demonstrate the efficacy of chiropractic. Only positive research can do that.
Finally, while the placebo effect is certainly real in a variety of treatments -- including in those embraced by the medical industry -- the difference here is that there is plenty of medical research that accounts for it and demonstrates the efficacy of a given treatment above and beyond it. Think of drug trials that consistently evince A amount of improvement in symptoms in X% of patients in treatment groups versus only Y% in control groups (those taking sugar pills). I've seen nothing similar when it comes to demonstrating the efficacy of specific chiropractic treatments, and nothing that parses the effects of chiropractic treatments versus other variables like the so-called 'power of touch'.
