Consumers With Chronic Conditions Turn to the Internet for Health Information
The internet is changing the way Americans engage with information when making health care decisions. Two major drivers for this change are broadband (high-speed) Internet connections and personal motivation according to Pew Internet & American Life Project associate director Susannah Fox.
The Pew Internet Project estimates that between 75% and 80% of American internet users have looked online for health information. This estimate is in line with Harris Interactive’s latest data on online health seekers (81% of internet users; 66% of all adults are searching online for health information).
Information Gathering Now a Habit for Many
This latest Pew Internet Project survey confirms that information gathering has become a habit for many Americans, particularly those in the 55% of households with broadband connections. Home broadband has now joined educational attainment, household income and age as the strongest predictors of Internet activity. For example, 78% of home broadband users look online for health information, compared with 70% of home dial-up users. Home broadband users are twice as likely as home dial-up users to do health research on a typical day — 12% vs. 6%. High-speed, always-on connections enable frequent and in-depth information searches, which is particularly attractive if something important is at stake.
Disability, Disease Tend To Increase Internet Usage
People who feel they have a lot at stake are more likely to engage intensely with online resources. Internet users living with a disability or chronic disease are more likely than other Internet users to be wide-ranging online health researchers and to report significant impacts from those searches. For example, 75% of Internet users with a chronic condition say their last health search affected a decision about how to deal with an illness or condition, compared with 55% of other e-patients (patients seeking health information online).
Newly diagnosed e-patients and those who have experienced a health crisis in the past year are also particularly tuned in: 59% say the information they found online led them to ask a doctor new questions or get a second opinion, compared with 48% of those who had not had a recent diagnosis or health crisis. Some 57% of recently challenged or diagnosed e-patients say they felt eager to share their new health care knowledge with others, compared with 45% of other e-patients. Experienced e-patients are posting technical advice online about managing a certain disease as well as advising people about how to communicate with health care providers. Other e-patients are gaining national attention by documenting significant problems with a drug, problems that FDA failed to catch. Some people are uploading their “Observations of Daily Living” in order to track their symptoms or reactions to various medical interventions.
More than Convenience
It is not just the convenience that draws Internet users, but the positive experiences that most people have with online research. In health, the impact of an online information search is more likely to be helpful, not harmful. Thirty-one percent of e-patients say they or someone they know has been significantly helped by following advice or health information found on the Internet. Only 3% of health seekers say they or someone they know has been seriously harmed by following the advice or information they found online.
In conclusion, the population of e-patients has stabilized at 75% to 80% of all Internet users and it is clear that broadband allows people to engage more deeply with information sources and with each other. And circumstances, such as a serious diagnosis can kick that engagement into high gear. The most affluent, highly educated and in need of care segment of the population is on the Internet looking for answers to their health challenges. There is a pressing need to present chiropractic (the world’s largest, most-established, licensed drugless health care option) to this ready, eager and actively searching majority of the American population with an organized, professionally designed and executed campaign. This unprecedented window or opportunity will not stay open forever.
New Study: Americans are Too Dumb to Manage Their Health
According to a survey by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services, just 12 percent of the nation’s 228 million adults have the skills to manage their own health care proficiently. Nearly 22 percent of those surveyed had just a basic understanding of medical treatments and 14 percent could only accomplish the most rudimentary tasks, such as understanding a short set of treatment instructions.
This should come as no surprise if what we call “health care” is a complex web of powerful chemicals, elaborate tests and billions of dollars in marketing and public relations with the overarching purpose of convincing every American that they suffer from a multitude of “conditions” that require these very expensive chemicals and tests.
However, the chiropractic model of health care is far easier to grasp. Any literate adult should be able to understand that the central nervous system regulates all cellular function in the the body. The brain is protected by the skull. The brain stem, spinal cord and nerve roots are protected my the bones of the spine. Care and maintenance of this vital system, through chiropractic care, is a firm foundation on which one can lay all five of the basic tenets of achieving and maintaining health:
- Consume a diet of nutrient rich, unprocessed foods and clean, pure water.
- Minimize emotional, physical and chemical stress on the body.
- Exercise regularly.
- Get adequate, restful sleep.
- Pro-actively maintain the structural integrity of the central nerve system.
Unfortunately, one of the greatest hindrances to achieving health is the current medical model. The pharmaceutical/medical industry is second only to the food industry in terms of destruction of the health of individuals.
Many seem to have forgotten that the human body is capable of healing itself of any “disease” known to man. The body is a community of 70 trillion cells, working in harmony to sustain life. When we remove the impediments (poor nutrition, poor nerve supply, lack of exercise, inadequate sleep, physical, chemical and emotional stresses), the body moves away from disease and toward health. This is the ” wellness” model that everyone is talking about, yet no one has yet adequately defined in the mind of the health care consumer.
Chiropractic care offers the firm foundation on which to build a true wellness model of health care. Chiropractors have been outspoken opponents of the overuse of drugs and critical of the medical model for 113 years. The foundational concept of the current medical model, that a medical doctor can ask someone to describe their symptoms and then select a chemical from the thousands available to “treat” those symptoms, is misguided.
This fundamental flaw in the medical paradigm is at the very core of much of the teachings on which chiropractic was founded. The fact that this flawed model is beyond the comprehension of most individuals is not surprising and should be considered a blessing.
The intelligence in the human body that transforms 2 cells into a perfectly formed human in 280 days is far superior to anything yet created by man. The human body needs nothing more than what is described above to produce perfect new cells to replace those cells that the body naturally purges every second of every day. The same power that made the body can heal the body of any challenge that presents itself, as long as the interference from outside (that which is not under the body’s control) is not greater than the body’s natural inclination toward health and survival, bolstered and supported by following the five tenets referenced above.
This is something that anyone can understand. They just need to hear it. Over and over and over again.
Drugs Prescribed for Subluxations Cause Suicide
A Senate inquiry found that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “isn’t keeping track of how drugs are marketed for off-label use, even though marketing for off-label use is illegal and it’s the FDA’s job to enforce that law,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa said in a statement. “As a result, drug makers aren’t being held accountable for promoting unapproved use of medicine and patient safety is diminished.”
The report from the Government Accountability Office delves into a gray area of medical practice and federal oversight: the use of medications to treat conditions other than the ones the drugs were approved for, a practice known as “off-label” prescribing. The Wall Street Journal reports that studies have found off-label use accounted for 40% to 50% of all prescriptions.
Drug companies are forbidden to promote medications for uses that have not been validated by the FDA on evidence from clinical trials. Doctors, however, can use independent judgment in prescribing medicines. Also, under guidance proposed by the FDA this year, drug companies could distribute to doctors “scientific articles” that suggest new and unapproved uses for medications
The review that Grassley requested by the investigative arm of Congress found that the FDA is ill-equipped to catch even blatant marketing abuses by drug companies. The agency does not have any staff exclusively assigned to monitor whether companies are following the rule against marketing drugs for unapproved uses. Although widely accepted, off-label prescribing can amount to an uncontrolled experiment. Many people have been harmed by unexpected side effects.
The study found that it takes FDA an average of seven months to issue a warning, according to a draft report by congressional investigators. It typically takes four more months for the company to fix the problem. During the ensuing 11 months, a lot of prescriptions can be written.
From 2003-2007, the office issued only 42 notices of possible violations, which usually (but not always) prompted the drug maker to drop its promotional claims.
Why does this matter to me as a chiropractor? One word: Neurontin.
Neurontin is a controversial anti-seizure drug approved for epilepsy, which was widely and illegally promoted by Pfizer for pain. Pfizer also illegally promoted the drug for bi-polar disorder and anxiety disorder.
In 2004, Pfizer pleaded guilty to criminal fraud in the promotion of Neurontin, and agreed to pay $430 million. This case is a classic example of drug marketing, demonstrating that the current system–as overseen under the stewardship of the FDA–encourages rather than discourages fraudulent marketing of ineffective, even dangerous drugs.
Neurontin was approved for limited use as a supplemental anti-seizure treatment for epilepsy, but was promoted by Lambert-Warner (now Pfizer) and a consortium of paid physicians who promoted and prescribed the drug for everything from ADHD, mental illnesses to a variety of pain conditions, including migraine headaches. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2004: “use of Neurontin for unapproved uses - estimated to account for 90% of the $2.7 billion in sales last year - continues to rise despite stepped up prosecutorial efforts aimed at curbing the practice. At the same time, studies show that much of the unapproved use of Neurontin isn’t even effective.”
The commercially successful marketing “miracle” of Neurontin was achieved through a collaborative effort of the company and leading physicians who were given financial incentives to encourage their colleagues–under the pretext of providing “continuing medical education”–to prescribe a largely ineffective drug for unapproved, diverse and unrelated conditions. Essentially physicians were “educated” to use their prescribing license to increase profits rather than to improve their patients’ health.
Neurontin and its successor Lyrica work by depressing the central nerve system. They are widely prescribed for “neuropathy”, “peripheral neuropathy” or “nerve pain”. The pharmaceutical answer to the subluxation is as follows: if there is a problem with the signals being transmitted over the nerve system, chemically shut down the transmission network.
The marketing for these chemicals include statements such as: “Peripheral Neuropathy is one of the most common diseases most people have never heard of…and yet, upwards of 20 million Americans have it. Peripheral neuropathy is caused by damage to your body’s peripheral nerves. This damage disrupts the body’s ability to communicate with its muscles, skin, joints, or internal organs. It is like the body’s wiring system breaking down.” They go on to explain that the nerve interference can be caused by: “compression, drugs and toxins, or of unknown psychological causes”.
Sound familiar to anyone? Improper communication between the brain and the muscles, skin, joints, or internal organs caused by physical, chemical or emotional stressors.
Drugs that chemically shut down the nerve system are raking in billions of dollars for drug companies who are promoting them as the only solution for “neuropathy”, which literally means “changes in the pathology of the nerve”. But wait, it gets worse.
Neurontin has been documented to cause potential side effects of depression, aggression and suicide. There are currently over 100 lawsuits pending in federal court from suicides that are allegedly tied to Neurontin. A researcher involved in the clinical trials that preceded Neurontin’s approval testified last month that the company was aware of the side effects as early as 1995.
In June 2008, the FDA officially announced that Neurontin, Lyrica and nine other epilepsy drugs are associated with a higher risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior. They are working, as you read this, on requiring that patients finally be warned of the associated risks with a “black box” warning, the FDA’s strongest safety notice.
In the mean time, millions of unsuspecting consumers are taking these potentially lethal chemicals to treat “nerve interference” causing back pain, neck pain, headaches or any other nerve related pain.
One more thing, Lyrica is the world’s first drug ever approved by the FDA to treat fibromyalgia. The time is now to stand up and have your voice heard. If you don’t do it, who will?
Chiropractic and the AMA Conspiracy to Contain and Eliminate
After more than a century of institutional discrimination against blacks in the medical profession, the American Medical Association has finally admitted its role in promoting such discrimination, issuing an apology for all the harm its racist policies have caused over the years. You can read the apology on the AMA Website.
Unknown to most consumers, the American Medical Association barred physicians from becoming members of the AMA unless they were first accepted as members of local AMA chapters, yet many local AMA chapters had rules specifically barring membership of black doctors well into the 1960’s.
The medical profession has a long history of discrimination, particularly against alternative healing professions. While always claiming public safety as its reasons for the attacks, the true reasons involve protecting their monopoly of the health care market.
In the past, medicine has fought battles to limit the practices of such professionals as homeopaths, naturopaths, osteopaths, podiatrists, optometrists, dentists, psychologists and chiropractors. In the case of osteopathy and chiropractic, there are distinct differences in the approach to healing and health when compared to medicine. The last thing that organized medicine wants is for their doctrine of drugs and surgery to be challenged.
Osteopaths allowed themselves to be absorbed by medicine–today there is little difference between an M.D. and a D.O. Chiropractic on the other hand, fought hard–through the personalities of those like B.J.Palmer to remain a separate and distinct profession.
Medicines opposition to chiropractic was at its strongest under the leadership of Morris Fishbein. Fishbein as Secretary of the American Medical Association from 1924 to 1949, lead a 25 year anti-chiropractic campaign in both professional publications and the public media. Fishbein called chiropractors “rabid dogs” and referred to them as “playful and cute..but killers.” He tried to portray chiropractors as members of an unscientific cult, caring about noting but taking their patients money.
In 1949 the AMA removed Fishbein but continued its wage an anti-chiropractic campaign. In 1971, H. Doyle Taylor, the Director of the AMA Department of Investigation, and Secretary of its Committee on Quackery (COQ), submitted a memo to the AMA Board of Trustees stating:
Since the AMA Board of Trustees decision, at its meeting on November 2-3, 1963, to establish a Committee on Quackery, your Committee has considered its prime mission to be, first, the containment of chiropractic and, ultimately, the elimination of chiropractic.
The following is an excerpt from the COQ’s first annual report to the Board of the AMA:
…The Involvement (and indoctrination) of the State Medical Society leadership, in our opinion, is vital to the success of the chiropractic program…We hope and believe that, with continued aggressive AMA activity, chiropractic can and will be contained at the national level and that steps are being taken to stop or eliminate the licenser of chiropractic at the state level.
In 1967 the COQ released its anti chiropractic campaign goals:
Basically, the Committee’s short-range objectives for containing the cult of chiropractic and any additional recognition it might achieve revolves about four points:
1. Doing everything within our power to see that chiropractic coverage under title 18 of the Medicare Law is not obtained.
2. Doing everything within our power to see that the recognition or listing by the U.S. Office of Education of a chiropractic accrediting agency is not achieved.
3. To encourage contained separation of the two national chiropractic associations.
4. To encourage state medical societies to take the initiative in their state legislatures in regard to legislation that might affect the practice of chiropractic.
The AMA through its Committee on Quackery continued its war against chiropractic through such acts as, distributing propaganda to the nation’s teachers and guidance councilors, eliminating the inclusion of chiropractic from the U.S Department of Labor’s, Health Careers Guidebook, and establishing specific educational guidelines for medical schools regarding the “hazards to individuals from the unscientific cult of chiropractic.”
The AMA did not stop with these acts of propaganda against the chiropractic profession. They worked both publicly and politically to insure that chiropractic failed as a profession. But, even with all of this negative publicity against the profession, chiropractic continued to gain acceptance with the general public, because chiropractic got results.
In 1975 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Goldfarb vs. The Virginia State Bar that learned professions are not exempt form antitrust suites. In 1982 the Court ruled that the FTC can enforce antitrust laws against medical societies. These two suites paved the way in 1976 for five chiropractors to file an anti-trust suite against the AMA and several other heath care agencies and societies in Federal District Court (known as the Wilkes Case).
Similar suites were filed in New York and Pennsylvania in 1979. The pressure of these law suites forced the AMA even before these suites went to court to propose a modification of their Medical Code of Ethics which prohibited M.D.s from associating with chiropractors. But, it was not until 1980 that the Ethics Code was changed to reflect that each individual doctor may decide for themselves whether to accept a patient from or refer a patient to a chiropractor or other limited practitioner.
The law suites caused so much fear in the medical profession that Mike Wallace (of 60 minutes) was unable to find an M.D. to take the anti-chiropractic side for a 1979 documentary piece on chiropractic.
In 1980 the Wilkes suite went to court, were the AMA and other defendants were found not guilty of all charges. That decision was overturned and a new trial was ordered by the U.S. Court of Appeals in February 1983.
Judge Susan Getzendanner found the AMA and others guilty of an illegal conspiracy against the chiropractic profession in September of 1987, ordering a permeate injunction against the AMA and forcing them to print the courts findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Several other of the defendants settled out of court helping to pay for the chiropractors legal expenses and donating to a chiropractic non-profit home for disabled children, Kentuckiana Children’s Center.
This decision was upheld in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1990 and again by the U.S. Supreme Court that same year.
And what did we do with the opportunity? Instead of coming out strongly and publicly exposing the proven illegal boycott and corruption on the part of the AMA, many within the profession saw this as an opportunity to embrace the new found “permission” given to the medical doctors by the AMA to associate with chiropractors as an opportunity to integrate chiropractic into the allopathic model.
To this day, most consumers are unaware that the “idea” that chiropractors are quacks was purposefully, illegally, underhandedly, and cleverly crafted and promoted by the AMA.
While unable to eliminate chiropractic, the combination of AMA tactics and lack of unity among chiropractors and chiropractic organizations has very effectively contained chiropractic. Contained to episodic treatment of back pain, contained to musculoskeletal only care, contained to seeing only 5% of the population. The truth is chiropractic has proven itself over the last 113 plus years, to be a safe and effective means of maintaining health. Isn’t it about time to get together and let the public know who we are, what we represent and what we have to offer?
Google’s Matt Cutts Cites Chiropractic Example
In a recent USA Today interview Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues, gave his top 5 easy tips on how to “optimize” your site so Google and the rest of the world can find it.
Matt gives an example of a San Diego chiropractor who lamented that his site was not listed at the top of the Google search engine results. A quick peek at the site revealed that nowhere on the site was the term “San Diego Chiropractor” spelled out.
This would seem like an obvious oversight, until you consider that even after deducing what word or phrase (AKA search term) Internet users will be searching on to find you, you must then decide how many times to repeat the search term on the page, whether to include the term in the “title tag”, in what order, and at what “density”. Should they be repeated in the “H1″ and “H2″ tags as well?
Once that has been worked out, go out and get some high quality “backlinks”, create a “blog” for your practice, get some traffic to your blog, hopefully resulting in some additional incoming links. Create interesting and fresh “content” for your blog and employ the latest strategies to get your blog found.
Next, go out and begin to “bookmark” your site on some popular social media sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon. Participate in the the discussion, get to know the etiquette necessary to successfully engage in these social media communities and you should, in time, have some limited success.
You are now ready to develop an “XML sitemap” for your site. If you create a search engine friendly “URL” structure, hopefully in a neat “silo structure”, factor in some “latent semantic indexing” terms that are appropriate for your site, and voila, your site will be found, indexed, and if you are really lucky, you may appear in the top 50 or so results of the current 283,000 results Google has indexed for the term “San Diego Chiropractor”. Change the search to “Chiropractor San Diego” and Google has 460,000 results indexed.
Now if all this is Greek to you, rest assured you are not alone. The fact is, trying to get an individual practice website to appear at the top of the search engines is a daunting, if not impossible task.
In fact, one of the largest Chiropractor web site companies in the country sent out an email very recently that stated ” we had neglected the whole search engine thing”. He went on to exclaim, after several years of charging nearly one thousand doctors a monthly fee for chiropractic websites, “We need to figure out this search engine thing”. This self inspection occurred only after being berated by a potential customer.
If the president of a company that has collected millions of dollars from chiropractors for web site services had to be taunted into investigating how this stuff works, should you feel bad if you need an Internet to English dictionary to make sense of all of this?
You are, after all a chiropractor, not a web site developer. And at the end of the day, having a top placement for a term such as San Diego chiropractor doesn’t mean much these days anyway.
Why? Because the “local” search results now appear over top of the “natural” search results for searches that contain a city name. So all of the aforementioned work and effort still will not put your practice information in front of consumers, at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).
And even if you could achieve top placement in your town for a term like “San Diego chiropractor”, this still only reaches the 5% of the population that are already looking for a chiropractor. This does nothing to reach the 10 million Americans who are searching the Internet for health information each and every day. They have no idea that chiropractic care can help them.
Do yourself a favor. Join together with the thousands of other chiropractors who had decided to let the computer geeks handle this web stuff and stick to making sick people well.
Together, we have developed a comprehensive program to not only put you in front of the Americans that regularly seek chiropractic care, but also put positive, accurate information about chiropractic in the hands of all Americans that can benefit from your care. And we reach them at the exact moment they are deciding what form that care should take.
You owe it to yourself to check out what is possible, by working together, rather than against one another. There is great power in numbers. Power to change the world. Get on board with other like minded chiropractors. Get involved with something big.
Let us worry about the complexities of search engine placement, local search optimization, keyword density, title tags, heading tags, blog posts, content creation, optimization, directory structure, etc, etc.
Do what you do best: improve the quality of life of your practice members. Let us handle getting them in the door.