Grinberg: Fearmongering Abounds for Rare Side Effects of Chiropractic Care

Tuesday, October 9, 2018 | 0

It is no secret in the workers’ compensation community that defendants generally dislike and disapprove of chiropractors, whether as primary treating physicians or as qualified medical evaluators.

Gregory Grinberg

One of the tenets of the cult of the defense attorney is that chiropractors will prolong temporary disability, inflate permanent disability, and drag out a case with unnecessary referrals and treatment.

Obviously, there are lots of chiropractors, and the practice is not all that monolithic. I know a chiropractor or two whom I recommend as agreed medical evaluators in my cases, and know that I will get a report just disappointing enough so that both parties can settle and close the file.

A closed file is a happy file, no?

But, seeing as it is October and Halloween is coming faster than a recently fired and disgruntled employee to an applicant attorney’s office, let’s engage in some spooky fearmongering.

According to an article from the University of Michigan, “forceful manipulation of the neck is linked to a damaging side effect: vision problems and bleeding inside the eye.”

The article quotes Dr. Yannis Paulus, of the U. of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center, that a 59-year-old woman experienced a “tadpole”-shaped spot in her vision after a chiropractic visit, which worsened over time but ultimately resolved.

Aside from vision problems, some physicians have warned of the risks of certain types of stroke, as well as a warning from the American Heart Association.

Both the article from University of Michigan and the warning state that the likelihood of cervical manipulation causing stroke or eye loss is low, but both also urged patients and chiropractors to be aware of the risk.

So, if you’re looking for a spooky story to tell to the Workers' Compensation Appeals Board, you can claim that setting foot in a chiropractor’s office will absolutely result in stroke and blindness (and, come to think of it, if the injured worker received chiropractic care and isn’t blind/suffering a stroke, doesn’t that mean that he or she didn’t really attend the appointment?).

In any case, if you do have an overlap of loss of eyesight or stroke as a compensable consequence, chiropractic care might be one avenue of causation to explore. Since both articles also mention the potential for reverse causation, it opens the door to exploring whether the need for chiropractic care is caused by an industrial injury or non-industrial loss of eyesight/stroke.

Now, who is going to go trick-or-treating as a chiropractor this year?

Gregory Grinberg is workers' compensation defense attorney at the Law Office of Gregory Grinberg, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This post is reprinted with permission from Grinberg's WCDefenseCA blog.