By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

The Planet Chiropractic e-mail inbox continues to fill up with messages of gratitude, thank you’s, testimonials, and words of excitement, from chiropractors, staff, spouses, and others that attended the 2008 DCS California Chiropractic Jam, this past weekend in Orange County, California. Instead of one news summary of the ginormous chiropractic event, we will be sharing a number of e-mails sent by chiropractors, that attended the Friday and Saturday event.

(photo: Southern California chiropractors Dr. Rob Bates and Dr. Don Trepany attending the DCS Orange County event)

From chiropractors attending the DCS Jam Event…

Billy D,
Ah, Dr. DeMoss that is…….

I just want to say thanks for a great event yesterday. I just got back home this morning, Sunday morning, around 9am. I had to cut out a little early last night to catch a red eye back to the Minneapolis due to a family commitment on Sunday. Then I had to drive 2 and a half hours back to God’s country, Decorah Iowa. I jammed the whole way home to AC/DC and other awesome tunes. For me, this was not just another get fired up to go like crazy for a couple weeks and then fizzle back to where I was, (In My Head.) I just added some bricks to the foundation! Thanks so much for your vision. You perfectly showed us all that if the mind can dream it, and you get off your ass and do something towards it, IT will happen. AND IT WILL HAPPEN BIG!!!!!!!

Love and Peace,
Dr. Perry Numedahl
—–

Thank you for putting on the California Jam and thank you for dinner Friday night! John thinks very highly of you and we all appreciate the work that you are doing. I am attending the Nutz & Boltz this Saturday in Seattle, looking forward to it and looking forward to next year!

Dr. Richard Pfeiffer
—–

Billy D and the DCS Team,

WOW!! You all ROCK so huge!! Thanks for creating an absolutely amazing experience for all of us through the DCS Cal Jam on Saturday. Thanks for caring so deeply about chiropractic and each of us that you sacrificed your time, energy, and money for us to put on the CAL JAM!!

I’m super excited to help you promote it for next year so please keep me in the loop of how I can best do that for you, for chiropractors, and for the world!!!

Thanks again.

With a heart over-flowing with gratitude and love,
Dr. Barbara Sturm
—–

Dr. Bill, Great Saturday! Best CE far and away. Very high Energy. Great speakers. I am still jazzed. My background. I have been a chiro for 20 years, and was in your bros class at LACC. Graduated in 1987. Spent 4 years as medipractor frustrated and uninspired. Always loved chiroprac-tic as I had early great experiences prior to school. Went to hear Donald Epstein in early 1991 and it changed my life. I have practiced network with specific adjustments ever since. I had reached a level of success as my practice grew and peoples lives were transformed. The power of Life was turned On. Your weekend has re-inspired me and your dedication to serve and spread the story has reminded me of why am here. I needed that now more than ever. I plan on attending your seminar in June. Thanks again, and look forward to talking with you sometime.

Fondly, Dr. Michael Whelan
—–

I Spent the weekend at the Chiropractic Summer Jam. Wow what a vision by Dr DeMoss. Just think if every Chiropractor would put 1/10 of the Energy as this Visionary! We could touch the hearts and bodys of Multitudes of Mankind. Thanks My life has been changed forever. Think what the world Could be like if we all just loved with the passion I experienced this weekend.

Dr. Eddie P Petry
—–

Thank you for the most amazing chiro gathering I have experienced! Very interested in the Tavarua trip in Sept. If space is still available (2) would you please pass on the details.

All the best,

Scott M. Lund, D.C.
“The #1 thief of health is procrastination” — B.J. Palmer
—–

The amazing thing is that this successful mega-event was NOT put on by a company whos business is putting on events. Cal Jam was the vision and project of a practicing DC who will be in the office tommorrow seeing patients. Dr. Bill Demoss has struck a power chord in the hearts of the California chiropractor, not to mention those from around the world. The event rocked in more ways than one and I can guarantee that on Monday morning there will be 1000+ fired up docs and staff filled with much healing and love for their patients. Thank you Billy D for your inspiration and LOVE for chiropractic!

Dr. John Bueler, Jr. (from comments posted to the Photo Slideshow DCS California Jam 2008)
—–

We had such a good time this past weekend. I know that you are all probally still resting, but when can we sign-up for next year? We’ve already told friends and they want to come too!

Dr. Charlie & Ami Enouen
—–

Billy D,

Thank you for your vision to come to fruition last weekend at the California Jam. What an awesome time with great speakers, and great brothers & sisters. Looking forward to the 2nd annual California Jam!!

God bless you,
Jon Nichols
—–

Related California Jam posts are here, and then here, over in this place here, a mention over here, back in this space, and there’s even photos you can share (please credit Planet Chiropractic with a link — https://planetc1.com/).

More DCS related news to come.

planetc1.com-news @ 9:05 pm | Article ID: 1209614782

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 3 out of 4 new moms in US now breast-feed their infants. That’s the highest rate in the U.S. since the 1980’s, according to a CDC/National Center for Health Statistics report released Wednesday.

According to the report, nearly 80 percent of new mothers breast-feed, at least briefly, up from 60 percent in 1993-1994.

Human milk is the ideal food for most infants. Breastfeeding benefits infants and their mothers. Breastfed infants receive anti-bodies from breast milk, which protect against infection in the early postpartum period, and breastfeeding is less expensive than formula feeding. The report summarizes information on breastfeeding rates in the United States based on data from the 1999-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES). Results are reported for the total U.S. population and three race-ethnic groups by birth year cohort.

Breastfeeding rates were examined by income status group. Income status was defined using the poverty income ratio (PIR), an index calculated by dividing family income by a poverty threshold that is specific for family size. Low income was defined as PIR less than or equal to 1.85, and high income was defined as PIR greater than 1.85. For the total population, the proportion of infants who were ever breastfed was lower among infants whose families had lower income compared with infants whose families had higher income status.

According to the report, the differences in breastfeeding rates by family income status were only observed among non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black infants, but not among Mexican-American infants.

Within each income group, the breastfeeding rates for non-Hispanic black infants were significantly lower compared with the breastfeeding rates among non-Hispanic white and Mexican-American infants. Infants whose mothers were younger were less likely to have been breastfed.

Breastfeeding rates increased significantly with increasing maternal age overall and for all race-ethnicity groups. The breastfeeding rates of mothers who were under 20 years of age were lower compared with mothers who were 30 years and older or 20-29 years of age.

Diet is an integral component of infant and child growth and development, and healthy feeding practices have benefits that continue into childhood and adolescence.

You can access the NCHS Data Brief to learn more about the findings.

A few Planet Chiropractic related articles include Breast-Feeding & Good Health, Better mental health for breastfed babies, and an Interview with Jennifer Laycock of The Lactivist.

planetc1.com-news @ 5:37 pm | Article ID: 1209602285

By Daria Belov

A vaccine manufacturer, operating a plant in the state of Pennsylvania, received a regulatory warning from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) involving multiple quality-control observations made after review of the manufacturing plant, at the company’s West Point facility.

The company is Merck, makers of blockbuster selling human papilloma virus vaccine Gardasil, makers of a hepatitis A vaccine, two hepatitis B vaccines, and the makers of Vioxx. According to news reports, the company does not expect the regulatory warning to hamper the vaccine makers ability to sell their currently marketed product.

According to a number of news reports, the FDA’s warning letter sent to Merck & Co. mentioned “significant deviations from current good manufacturing practice … in the manufacture of licensed biological vaccine products, bulk drug substances, and drug components” at the plant based in Pennsylvania.

The letter was dated April 28 and it is based on a November 2007 through January 2008 FDA inspection of the vaccine manufacturing plant. According to news reports, the FDA noted that certain lots of pediatric vaccines were recalled as a precautionary measure in December 2007, and production was suspended, with distribution not expected to resume until the fourth quarter of 2008. Amongst the lots of vaccines recalled, were those chemically manufactured to prevent disease caused by Haemophilus influenza type B in infants.

Chiropractor, Darrel Crain, authored a lengthy article regarding the FDA and lawsuit preemption, published just last week. Perhaps news of these warning letters made to vaccine manufacturers are intended to ease the public’s concerns that drug companies are getting away with murder.

It was only two weeks ago that the same drug company manufacture was in the news regarding reports of manipulation of data and scientific fraud. While a number of people may be thinking these types of revelations are new, there’s undoubtedly scores of people within the scientific community that are far too familiar with a dark side of the manufacturing and marketing of vaccines and pharmaceuticals.

planetc1.com-news @ 12:41 pm | Article ID: 1209584521

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

There is little that motivates me more than witnessing chiropractic students working a room at a chiropractic conference or seminar. This past Saturday while attending DCS California Jam I was approached a number of times by chiropractic students from Life West College of Chiropractic with information about an event coming up in May. Told them I’d see what I could do about spreading the word.

(photo: Chiropractors to be, David and Skylar, hold up a flyer for Lyceum 2008)

DCS California Jam was a blast, we’ve pretty much established that by now. Amongst the hundreds of people I got reconnected with this past Saturday, were a number of students (soon to be chiropractors) that I hadn’t seen in a year or more. It was inspirational to see them still going strong with excitement about becoming doctors of chiropractic.

The first annual Delta Sigma Chi Spring Lyceum is taking place on May 9-11, 2008 on the Life West Campus in Hayward, California. I took one look at the flyer and knew this would be a spectacular event. The lineup features world influential chiropractors such as Dr. Fred Schofield, Dr. Rebecca Nystrom, Dr. Shawn Dill, Dr. Troy Dreilling, Dr. Stew Bittman, Dr. Don Harte, Dr. Carlos Selles, and more.

This event will be held on the weekend following the Life West Annual Spring for Life Celebration on May 8. The purpose of this Lyceum is to unite students and chiropractors in a forum of intellectually engaging speakers presenting on the Philosophy, Science, and Art of Chiropractic. This event will educate and inspire!

Registration for students and chiropractic assistants is $100 and registration for Doctors of Chiropractic is $150. Students can sign up Tuesdays and Thursdays in Sid Square between 9:20 a.m. and 9:50 a.m. which is located on the Life West campus.

For every doctor of chiropractic a student brings, the student will receive a $25 discount toward their registration. This is not a continuing education event. View more details regarding this Lyceum 2008 event and browse through the seminars and conferences section for other events taking place in the month of May. For more Lyceum details via e-mail you can send a message to… Lyceum.2008 at Yahoo.com

There is some brief information related to other chiropractic events and conferences taking place in May available for viewing here, on the blog, and here.

Know about a chiropractic event, seminar, or conference that we are not reporting about? Contact us (e-mail via the yellow envelope above) and let us know what’s going on in your part of the world.

planetc1.com-news @ 1:35 pm | Article ID: 1209414935

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

Chiropractors packed the house at the Performing Arts Center in Orange County, all day Saturday, April 26, 2008. Planet Chiropractic was there to capture photos of the event and conduct interviews with dozens of chiropractors (mostly from the state of California) that were in attendance. There will be multiple articles on the news pages and blog pages throughout this week, related to the DCS CalJam and other upcoming events. What a great time to be a chiropractor.

(photo: chiropractor wearing a Dead Chiropractic Society T-shirt)

The first batch of photos provided by Planet Chiropractic have been uploaded to our chiropractic flickr account and are available for viewing and commenting. The photo set is titled DCS California Jam 2008 (click the link to view the set).

Among the photos are multiple images of chiropractors practicing in the California, Arizona, and Washington areas. There are some very cool photos showing chiropractic artwork, some chiropractors performing adjusting technique, groups of chiropractors gathered together for lunch, photos of the crowd inside the performing arts center, and photos from chiropractic vendor booths.

Some well-known chiropractic faces include Dr. George Khoury of Livermore, California, Dr. Carolyn Griffin of Santa Clarita, Dr. Terry Rondberg of The Chiropractic Journal, Dr. Patrick Gentempo of the Chiropractic Leadership Alliance, Dr. Fred Schofield, Dr. Bill DeMoss, Dr. Lawrence Clayman of Seattle, Washington, as well as many others.

This was quite an exceptional conference. There were dozens of vendors to support the show and more than a thousand chiropractors were in attendance. Many came to fulfill licensing requirements but the events were not presented in a bland and boring fashion. Spectacular videos were shown during intermissions (about vaccines, death from drugs, overdosing of America) and loud rock ‘n roll music (ala Black Sabbath) was played in the center and halls. I wouldn’t be surprised if this event was double or triple its size in 2009.

If you have a Firefox browser you can view a slideshow of the entire photo presentation here… Photo Slideshow DCS California Jam 2008.

The photos from the conference are available here. Get future chiropractic seminars and event information on the conference pages.

planetc1.com-news @ 1:41 pm | Article ID: 1209328899

By Darrel Crain, D.C.

Everyone seems to be picking on the poor Food and Drug Administration (FDA) these days, but for vastly different reasons. To the hundreds of thousands of victims (including dead ones) of adverse prescription drug reactions each year, and their families, the FDA is failing to protect the public. These people believe the agency should spend more time and effort making sure drugs are safe and effective before approval. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies feel the FDA is a nuisance, way too fussy about drug safety details and terribly slow with approval. This, they say, deprives consumers of the latest drugs, not to mention delaying company profits.

Drug companies have long insisted that going to all the trouble and expense of obtaining FDA approval for their drugs and medical devices should entitle them to complete immunity from all product liability lawsuits. In other words, if FDA-approved drugs destroy your health or kill a loved one, get over it.

A few years ago Dr. Allen Roses, an executive vice president with drug maker GlaxoSmithKline admitted in an interview that prescription drugs are irrelevant to the health of most people, most of the time. “The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 percent of the people,” he said.

A much different story is relentlessly beaten into the minds of the public every day by aggressive, multi-billion-dollar-a-year drug marketing. That story tells us that every human illness is a drug deficiency disease that can only be “cured” by taking the latest drug every single day for the rest of one”s life.

Imagine if those billions were instead spent on a massive public education campaign teaching the two basic, unchanging principles of human life and health: 1) Lifestyle and environmental factors account for the vast majority of health disorders, and 2) For most people the body is perfectly capable of healing itself when underlying nutritional deficiencies are corrected, toxins are cleared and lifestyle improved. But I digress.

President Bush has long pushed for preemption of lawsuits for drug companies, arguing that the expert doctors at the FDA are the only people in the country smart enough to understand these complicated matters, and the courts should not try and second-guess the all-wise FDA.

Gee, did someone forget to tell the president that the experts over at the FDA have already given notice that the agency is completely incompetent? The FDA’s science board spent a year studying problems at the agency, and concluded that a lack of resources and personnel “is imposing a significant risk to the integrity of the food, drug, cosmetic and device regulatory system, and hence the safety of the public.”

The new protocol for public safety seems pretty obvious: Avoid taking anything approved by the FDA.

As if things weren”t bad enough already, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to rule in favor of drug-maker Wyeth in a case that will likely usher in total preemption of lawsuits for all products approved by the FDA.

Johnson and Johnson is only one of the drug giants salivating at the enormous windfall in store once the courtroom doors are locked to drug-injured parties. J&J lawyers are already using the preemption argument to defend the company from 3,000 women suing for serious health problems caused by its birth control patch. Injuries to women who have used the patch include heart attacks, strokes and at least 40 deaths.

One scientist within Johnson and Johnson urged the company to conduct a formal evidence-based review following FDA approval because of “an abnormally high number of ‘spontaneous cases’ of clotting disorders, as well as death,” associated with the patch. The company never performed such a study.

To its credit, Johnson and Johnson does admit that initial drug safety data on the patch was altered using a “correction factor.” This is another way of saying “we made up the numbers.” But J&J lawyers swear this kind of monkey business is normal and standard procedure for safety trials, and I believe them.

Apparently it has also become normal to delete negative drug reactions from safety reports submitted to the FDA, and lie about who wrote the reports, as we discovered with the Vioxx debacle. Since the FDA does not carry out drug safety research itself, its decisions are based on whatever selective and biased reporting the companies decide to hand in.

Before being pulled from the market, Merck & Company’s drug Vioxx, a pain medication described as no more effective than over-the-counter pain relievers, caused more than 100,000 heart attacks and at least 50,000 deaths in the United States, according to senior FDA researcher Dr. David Graham. The public did not learn details about Merck”s massive data doctoring until forced to open up its cooked books in courtroom proceedings.

Even when lawsuits force some companies to come clean on their dirty secrets, we must remember that the gold standard of clinical science itself, the placebo-controlled randomized trial, has been downgraded to a fool’s gold standard. Over recent decades, drug companies have “streamlined” standard clinical procedures to improve chances for FDA approval.

Randomization of patient selection has been replaced with “run-up” and “pre-trial adjustment” periods, in which test subjects are removed from the study whose responses make placebos look too good or the drug too toxic. This prevents the data from being “skewed” by real-world responses.

Many of today’s placebos are also fakes, doctored with chemicals that mimic the side effects caused by the drug being tested. Obviously, if the “placebo” causes adverse reactions similar to the tested drug, the drug looks much better.

In modern vaccine trials, so-called placebos can contain toxic chemical cocktails that are part of the tested vaccine, including aluminum. The adverse reactions people have to such neurotoxins are then counted as placebo responses.

As any first year student of science can tell you, a scientifically valid clinical trial demands the use of a control group receiving a placebo with zero active ingredients, without exception.

In any other industry, these kinds of creative “improvements” to established scientific protocol would be called “cheating.” Drug companies have their own word for drug safety trials that violate basic rules of science, “profitable.”

Lawsuits have traditionally served as the only check and balance available to shore up the shortcomings of the FDA. As things stand, if preemption wins the day and lawsuits are forbidden, the drug companies will be free to get away with murder more than ever because they will never be forced to disclose exactly how the numbers were fudged or what data was withheld to gain approval.

While preemption is a spiffy idea for the drug companies, it is grossly unfair to the rest of us and violates the constitutional right of citizens to due process of law. Perhaps there is another, more equitable strategy to pull us out of the regulatory quagmire at the FDA.

What about leaving it up to the free market? As Thomas Jefferson once pointed out, “It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”

An absolutely free, unfettered, lassieze-faire market may be the most suitable solution for the business of making and selling prescription drugs. Why not completely dismantle the entire regulatory process of the FDA? What good are lengthy and expensive drug safety trials when they get falsified in the end anyway?

Dispense with the corrupt approval process and the money saved from the trials can be reallocated to pay for courtroom expenses and settlements. This is the kind of feedback that forces companies to make safer products.

Let the pharmaceutical companies quit their whining and swallow their own bitter pill of legal accountability. Let every drug company large or small concoct whatever chemical drug it wants to, advertise whatever miraculous benefits sound good, and then leave it to the marketplace to decide what really works, what harms and what kills.

If a company profits from a drug that turns human liver to a quivering glob of goo, or kills a few hundred or a few thousand people, that company deserves to be righteously sued in a court of law. Directors at the top of any company selling deadly goods should be held criminally liable for damages. Why should dangerous and deadly medical products be treated differently than dangerous and deadly tires, toasters, tainted food, or anything else?

To the drug lords hiding in the boardrooms of the pharmaceutical houses, I say if you are afraid to stand up for the integrity of your products and face your victims in the courtroom, then switch to the pesticide business where chemicals for sale are fully intended to cause death and disability.

The time has come to unleash the free market on the pharmaceutical industry and leave it to the invisible hand of supply and demand to sort things out. But first let’s make sure we preserve the time-honored tradition of due process in a court of law for those consumers harmed by bad goods.

planetc1.com-news @ 8:40 pm | Article ID: 1209094879