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The BMJ logoLink to The BMJ
. 1998 Oct 17;317(7165):1088. doi: 10.1136/bmj.317.7165.1088d

WEBSITE OF THE WEEK

Douglas Carnall 1
PMCID: PMC1114088  PMID: 9774320

graphic file with name web.f1.jpg

http://www.chiro.org/home.shtml Chiropractic is in the news this week with a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine challenging its efficacy in the management of childhood asthma (unsurprisingly) but also in the management of back pain (see p 1036). If spinal manipulation is going to work for anything it must be the latter, but no differences were found in time lost from work between the treated patients and the controls. graphic file with name chiro.f1.jpg

If your route to this information is from the chiro.org website you would be fairly informed of the results of this study through links to newspaper articles on the web (though not directly, interestingly, to the abstract published on the NEJM’s own website), and to a rebuttal (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/981007/va_aca_nej_1.html). This is fair play, and a useful counter to the tendency for major journal articles to cause media hysteria for a week and amnesia thereafter.

Although the page design is not entirely consistent, it gives the site a pleasingly non-corporate flavour and never descends into navigational awkwardness. While chiro.org scores top marks for timeliness and for its gamut of technology led features, it falls down on some fundamentals. There is an ftp directory (a list of down loadable files) of chiropractic history but little on the principles that underlie contemporary practice. If it is to fulfil its aim of building “an Internet site where ALL Chiropractors ... put aside their differences and work toward providing the best information and communication possible,” it will have to work much harder on providing good quality content.


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