Chiropractors and Vaccination

By Paul Benedetti and Wayne MacPhail

On a rainy night in November, 50 people sat in a packed room at the Kulhay Wellness Centre in Toronto. Many had come in response to ads in Vitality magazine about a Vaccine Awareness Night. At the back of the room young mothers sat with babies and newborns on their laps. A video had just ended. It was about the dangers of vaccinations. Speakers in the video had said that vaccines cause the diseases they're supposed to cure. They also said that vaccines cause sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), cancer, asthma, Attention Deficit Disorder and multiple sclerosis. That vaccines contain animal proteins that stay in human DNA for generations. None of those statements is true.

Dr. Patricia Marchuk, a family physician, was in the audience. She was appalled by what she had just watched. "I felt so terrible for all those people. If I didn't know what I knew I would have been horrified by the video," said Marchuk, "and the young mums were. Young parents are so vulnerable to this of thing, because they want to do everything right."

The Kulhay Wellness Centre is run by Dr. Katrina Kulhay, a chiropractor who graduated from the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in 1983. A message board near the student library at the CMCC advertises seminars offered by Kulhay.

After the video was screened Kulhay spoke to the crowd about the dangers of vaccination. Attendees could also collect information sheets about the dangers of vaccination. One, titled "The Dark Side of Flu Shots" states that animal DNA can be passed to humans through vaccination and points out that "natural health advocates" consider the use of a high- protein, sugar-free diet, full-spectrum lighting and supplementation with zinc, vitamin C, echinacea, and sublingual oil of oregano drops as a alternative to a flu vaccine.

While Kulhay is more outspoken than most chiropractors about concerns about immunization, she's not a voice in the wilderness among the profession.

Despite sound medical evidence of the safety and benefit of immunizations, chiropractic, since its birth at the turn of the century, has been anything but friendly to vaccination. One of the founders of chiropractic, B.J. Palmer, called immunization a form of poisoning. In the late 1950s, in the midst of an epidemic, the U.S. National Chiropractic Association campaigned against the polio vaccine. Why do chiropractors feel so strongly about a medical breakthrough that has saved millions of lives worldwide? Because Chiropractic philosophy holds that a body with a spine free of subluxations, or misalignments, is capable of insuring its own health.

Even today, in Canada, chiropractors are wary of, and some openly hostile to, the idea of artificial immunization or vaccination. Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College officials say they are not anti-immunization but merely promote the "individual's right to freedom of choice" when it comes to immunization.

A textbook used by the college, Pediatric Chiropractic, questions "universal immunization in developed countries". It features a 20-page chapter that focuses almost exclusively on vaccine failures, side effects and adverse reactions to popular vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, polio, influenza and Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussiss (Dtp). In general, the chapter takes a very dim view of vaccination. It concludes by stating that "our emphasis on presenting the adverse consequences of certain vaccines is healthy and it may allow parents to make more informed choices."

Students who visit the CMCC bookstore where the textbook is available can also buy a copy of "A Shot in the Dark- Why the P in the Dpt Vaccination May Be Hazardous to Your Child's Health ".

The book, which is also available in other popular bookstores, paints a horrific picture of the impact of the whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine. Medical scientists consider the risk/benefit ratio for the DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) vaccine to be very low.

Vaccine safety became an issue in the mid-1970s, especially in the U.S., when there were dozens of lawsuits filed by parents who felt their children were injured by the diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus (DPT) vaccine.

Court cases were won and damages awarded in spite of a lack of scientific evidence to support the injury claims. Since then, manufacturers of vaccines have purified and improved the vaccines and information is provided to parents on the risks and benefits of vaccinating their children.

Research has established the overwhelming public health benefits of immunization. There are, however, anti-vaccine groups that beg to differ.

Kulhay, who offers her Vaccination Awareness Evenings, isn't the only CMCC graduate who warns the public about vaccinations. Dr. Bob Pike runs the Pike Chiropractic Healing Centre in Keswick, Ont. Pike graduated from CMCC in 1980. This fall Pike ran a series of ads about immunization in a local newspaper, the Georgina Advocate, a local newspaper. One ad informs readers that vaccination is "breaking the chain of natural passive immunity" so that mothers are no longer able to pass antibodies to their babies in their milk. Another ad argues it is an "abuse of rights" for a medical officer of health to remove unvaccinated pupils from a school in the event of an outbreak of an infectious disease. "Threatening the unvaccinated with expulsion is, in my opinion, a tactic calculated to manipulate parents into a choice based on fear instead of freedom," Pike writes.

Dr. Patricia Marchuk, a family physician practising in the same community as Pike, points out that unimmunized children are asked to stay home during an infectious outbreak for their own health. "An infectious disease can break out in a school because no vaccine is 100 per cent effective," she explained. "Unimmunized children are asked to stay home because we know that are very vulnerable," she said. "It's for their own protection, not persecution."

In November, 1997, a 16-year-old Kitchener girl died of meningitis. Two weeks later four other students contracted the same strain, and temporary vaccination clinics were set up in six area high schools to inoculate thousands of students.

Dr. Jeffrey Winchester, a chiropractor who graduated from CMCC in 1991, picketed one clinic and used a sign reading "Meningitis shot is not mandatory or necessary". Winchester told the Kitchener-Waterloo Record he felt, "all inoculations are dangerous because they mess with the body's natural immune system."

Dr. James Gregg, another Waterloo area chiropractor, graduated from CMCC in 1997. During the meningitis outbreak he agreed with Dr. Winchester. He told the Record that some people are at high risk for meningitis but that "a mass vaccination program isn't needed."

Jane Daley, the region's director of infectious diseases, said that the inoculation was necessary. She disagreed with the positions held by Winchester and Gregg. "Philosophically, we just have different approaches to disease control," she said.