he wrote critically of vaccinations 90 years ago, “[I}t is the very height of absurdity to strive to ‘protect’ any person from smallpox or any other malady by inoculating them with a filthy animal poison....” Although interest in the subject has apparently waxed and waned through the years, many chiropractors have remained opposed to immunization.
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Opposition is not found only in the fringes of chiropractic, but has been espoused by mainstream chiropractic organizations. Vaccine successes over the past several decades have not tempered this opposition.
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The National Chiropractic Association, the predecessor organization to the American Chiropractic Association, opposed the polio vaccination program in the 1950’s. An organization called the World Chiropractic Alliance has within the last few years launched a legal and public relations campaign opposing current immunization policy. A survey published in the chiropractic Journal of Manipulative Physiologic Therapeutics reported that one third of surveyed chiropractors agreed that “there is no scientific proof that immunization prevents disease; that vaccinations cause more disease than they prevent; and that contracting an infectious disease is safer than immunization...”(3).
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It may be hard to believe that seemingly rational people could hold such views, especially in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. It is even harder to believe that members of profession which claims to concern itself with health could hold a position that is so completely in conflict with both clinical experience and experimental data, which over and over have demonstrated the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
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Homeopaths Antagonistic to Immunization
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Homeopaths and their advocates represent another enclave of antivaccine sentiment. (Many chiropractors also practice homeopathy in addition to musculoskeletal manipulation, so there is some overlap in these two groups of opposition to vaccines.) Homeopathy is a pseudomedical practice devised and discredited many years ago. It has gained new popularity among some advocates of socalled ‘alternative’ medicine.
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Homeopathy involves the mistaken belief that substances have a stronger effect on the body as they are made more dilute. Homeopaths also believe that tiny amounts of substances diluted in water or alcohol obtain mystical”healing energy” through vigorous shaking, even when these solutions are so dilute as to contain only water or alcohol. Homeopathy’s principles have been refuted by the basic sciences of chemistry, physics, pharmacology, and pathology (4). It is important that any observer of homeopathy understand that belief in this pseudomedical technique signifies a basic lack of understanding of the fundamental principles of science.
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Many homeopaths actively discourage the use of vaccines. Many do not even believe in the germ theory of disease, but attribute disease to an “energy imbalance” that is supposedly corrected through the administration of
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