The aim of this retrospective chart-review was to identify the percentage of non-musculoskeletal and musculoskeletal conditions treated by interns in the NUHS Student Clinic. The information was taken from the charts of patients treated in the fall trimester of 2011.

The results show that 52% of all patients were treated only for musculoskeletal conditions, and 48% were treated for non-musculoskeletal conditions, or musculoskeletal plus non-musculoskeletal conditions.

The authors draw the following conclusions: The NUHS Student Clinic interns are treating a greater percentage of non-musculoskeletal conditions and a lesser percentage of musculoskeletal conditions than practicing chiropractic physicians. The student interns also treat a lesser percentage of non-musculoskeletal and a greater percentage of musculoskeletal conditions than allopathic practitioners. This comparison would suggest that NUHS is nearing its institutional goal of training its student interns as primary care practitioners.

The very last sentence of the conclusions is particularly surprising, in my view. Do these findings really imply that the NUHS is training competent primary care practitioners? I fail to see that the data demonstrate this. On the contrary, I think they show that some US chiropractic schools want to promote the notion that chiropractors are, in fact, primary care physicians. More worryingly, I fear that this article demonstrates how, through the diligent work of chiropractic schools, the myth is being kept alive that chiropractic is effective for all sorts of non-musculoskeletal conditions. In other words, I think we might here have a fine example of unsubstantiated beliefs being handed from one to the next generation of chiropractors.

Evidence-based chiropractic my foot! They continue to “happily promote bogus claims”.