What Evidence Supports Activator Care?

In healthcare's back rooms of the last decade, the phrase "evidence-based care" has been bandied about so frequently that it has almost lost its meaning. However, you may never have even heard the phrase. What is evidence-based care? In its simplest sense, it means that a doctor ought to consider first those treatments which have been verified in a research environment.

Very often, however, this interpretation of "evidence-based care" can end up being biased. Many research studies and articles are funded by (and therefore driven towards positive results by) interested parties. Negative studies are often discarded or suppressed. Results from a laboratory are often different than results found in the real world, since each paper must be quantifiable with results proven as statistical figures. Of course, as any pollster will tell you, numbers can be slanted to justify any desired interpretation.

Those shortcomings being acknowledged, there are profound benefits to research. The most obvious is the verification of a treatment's effectiveness, which can affirm the clinician's on-the-spot decision-making process. As an Activator clinician, I need to know that what I do really does help my patients, even beyond the obvious benefits that they report and that I record. I need to have a resource available which will guide me towards treatments or referrals. I need to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to help one child.

The co-founder of the Activator Method, Dr. Arlan Fuhr, recognized many decades ago that this chiropractic technique needed to be confirmed by extensive research. He dedicated many resources and recruited many researchers to probe the results and benefits of Activator treatments. Naturally, because he funded many of these studies, the charges of bias can be laid towards the hundreds of papers and studies, but the sheer bulk of the data has given many chiropractors the evidence and confidence that even many medical fields still lack.

Chiropractic was once considered quackery. Partly thanks to Dr. Fuhr's foresight, chiropractic is now rightly seen as the scientific method that it is.