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Health Care Update

Tips For Turning Walking Into An Optimal Workout
While some fitness enthusiasts relentlessly seek out the latest, trendiest exercise crazes, many others are returning to good, old-fashioned walking to help them feel great and get into shape. Whether enjoying the wonder of nature or the company of a friend, walking can be a healthy, invigorating experience. And thanks to its convenience and simplicity, walking just might be right for you too, according to the American Chiropractic Association (ACA).

“A sedentary lifestyle has a debilitating influence on people’s health as they age,” says Dr. Jerome McAndrews, national spokesperson for the ACA. “Exercise is imperative.”

Walking accomplishes all of the following and more: It improves cardiovascular endurance, tones muscles of the lower body, burns calories and reduces risk of heart disease.

Fortunately, you do not need to sign up for an expensive gym membership to go walking. And except for a good pair of shoes, walking requires virtually no equipment. Dr. McAndrews recommends the following tips when selecting a pair of walking shoes:

Make sure the shoes you purchase fit properly. The balls of your feet should rest exactly at the point where the toe end of the shoe bends during walking. Avoid high-top shoes because they often cover the entire ankle, limiting your foot’s ability to move freely and naturally. Opt instead for shoes that offer your ankle a fuller range of motion. Select shoes with plenty of cushioning in the soles to absorb the impact of your walking.
Walking just 12 minutes every other day can offer important health benefits. Walking 20 minutes every other day is even better. But in order to increase your longevity, try to eventually work up to 30 minutes, five days per week.
Be sure to drink 10 eight-ounce glasses of water a day to help keep the kidneys active, dilute and remove toxins from the body and replace lost fluids.

ICA Protests PBS Attack On Chiropractic, Demands Apology And Recall of Program
The International Chiropractors Association is calling for an immediate and universal response from the chiropractic community to protest the ongoing broadcast of a grossly distorted and internationally damaging depiction of the science and practice of chiropractic on Public Broadcasting Service stations across the U.S.

In a regular feature show, Scientific American Frontiers, carefully developed negative and demonstrably false information is being broadcast in an episode entitled “A Different Way to Heal?” This program is supposedly looking at alternative approaches to health care. It is clear, however, that the producers were anything but objective when gathering their material. Both the script and the clips included are designed to distort the public’s understanding of chiropractic in a most negative and damaging way.

In the broadcast that first aired on June 4, hosted by well-known celebrity Alan Alda, chiropractic is represented as being unscientific, religion-based and extremely dangerous, all representations which are insulting and damaging to the 55,000 doctors of chiropractic who are licensed doctor-level health care providers and the millions of patients who are under their care. The producers of this show made an obvious decision to seek out chiropractic’s most virulent critics, presenting their assertions as fact and characterizing the few positive aspects of chiropractic noted in the show, such as the enthusiastic testimonial of a patient, as unreliable and lacking in validity.

“It is crystal clear that from start to finish, the objective of this production was to project the most negative picture of chiropractic possible,” said ICA President Dr. D.D. Humber. “The carefully crafted, demeaning language, the complete distortion of the most basic facts about chiropractic and the absence of any reference to any of the landmark elements of chiropractic’s validity, from state licensure and Medicare inclusion to any of the hundreds of studies that provide compelling evidence of chiropractic’s effectiveness, reveal the editorial mission of this production.”

The ICA attempted to contact senior PBS management personnel and the production company that created the show. Both declined to discuss the concerns of the chiropractic profession and ICA has no choice but to take the necessary protest to a very public level. ICA urges all doctors of chiropractic, students, patients and any citizen concerned about fairness in the media to review the substance of this broadcast and to contact PBS and demand that the program be immediately withdrawn from broadcast schedules, that an apology be issued and that an opportunity be provided to correct the grotesquely distorted and intentionally damaging picture of chiropractic painted by this show.

Concerned citizens can contact PBS via the Internet at PBS.org . Through that web site, chiropractors can locate their local PBS stations, and obtain specific addresses and contact information. You can contact PBS via e-mail at www.pbs.org/aboutsite/feedback.html. PBS can also be contacted by mail by writing to: Ms. Pat Mitchell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Public Broadcasting Service, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314.

NIH Funds Botanical Center in Iowa to Study Health Effects of Echinacea and St. John’s Wort
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS), components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced a five-year, $6 million grant for the establishment of a research center based in Ames, Iowa, to study two botanical dietary supplement ingredients, echinacea and hypericum (St. John’s wort). Echinacea is reputed to ward off colds and other infections, while St. John’s wort is purported to combat mild depression.

The new Center for Dietary Supplement Research brings together two traditionally strong research institutions, Iowa State University in Ames and the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

NIEHS Director Kenneth Olden, Ph.D., who also directs the National Toxicology Program, said, “The herbs and supplements we take into our bodies are important parts of our personal environments. We want to know about their potential effects, good or bad, which is why our National Toxicology Program is conducting herbal safety studies.”

An Open Letter to All Chiropractic Technique Developers and Experts
The second phase of a three-phase project to document and codify chiropractic technique for the benefit of the chiropractic profession and consumers is underway. A few years ago the Council on Chiropractic Practice (CCP) formed and subsequently developed its Clinical Guideline Number 1 titled Vertebral Subluxation in Chiropractic Practice. The development of the CCP Guidelines consisted of an exhaustive review of the subluxation related chiropractic literature as well as a technique conference and a leadership conference. The CCP guides have gone on to become well accepted throughout the United States and Canada by the chiropractic profession.

The development of the CCP guides was the first step in this endeavor and the CCP is now moving on to the second. In a cooperative effort between the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, The Council on Chiropractic Practice and the World Chiropractic Alliance, they are beginning the process of developing a Compendium of Chiropractic Technique which will be published and made available to the profession and other interested parties. In order to accomplish this task, they need the participation of all the technique experts.

A meeting of all interested parties was held during the World Chiropractic Alliance International Summit March 1-4, 2001 in Washington DC. The purpose of this meeting was to set the guidelines for what will be included in the document. Contact Dr. Matthew McCoy, editor of the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, at editor@jvsr.com to become involved in this project.

New Report Sites Health of American Children
Children in America are less likely to die during infancy than they were in previous years, less likely to smoke in eighth or 10th grade and less likely to give birth during adolescence, according to the sixth annual report, America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2002. The report also noted improvements in some of the economic security indicators: children are more likely to have at least one working parent and to have health insurance. Moreover, children from ages 3 to 5 are more likely to be read to daily by a family member.

The America’s Children report monitors the status of children in the United States and contains information on population and family characteristics. Most of the report’s other indicators on the well-being of the country’s children either remains unchanged from the previous year or did not change in a statistically significant manner. Among them: the child poverty rate (16 percent in 2000), the number of 12th grade students who smoked daily (19 percent in 2001) and the number of 12th graders who said they drank five or more alcoholic beverages in a row in the last 2 weeks (30 percent in 2001). Although many indicators show no significant change from the previous year, they often illustrate a larger trend that took place over several years.

The report, compiled by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, presents a comprehensive look at critical areas of child well-being, including economic security, health status, behavior, social environment and education. As in previous years, the report shows that most children—82 percent overall—are in very good or excellent health. However, children living in poverty are less likely than children in higher-income families to be in very good or excellent health. Nevertheless, the gap in health status by income narrowed over the past few years. In 1984, just over 60 percent of low-income children were in very good or excellent health, but by 2000 this number had risen to 70 percent.

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