Li17 brought this YouTube video to my attention. Parts of the video may be disconcerting to some people; however, it is likely worth watching. A contrarian view can sometimes be helpful. This doctor has more training than just chiropractic training. His website drjohnbergman.com has a bio. His site also has many other health videos.
What he thinks is one of the major causes for AF mirrors my experience.
Hi EngMac. I just watched dr john bergman's video on cardiac arrythmias and want to thank you for turning me on to his video and website. I thought the video made a good point of something that frequently happens in healthcare. When new eases are examined to determine cause it's like peeling an onion. In the beginning researchers are so excited to get their findings made public and recoup their research $ that often info/procedures/meds are made available to the public before the onion has been completely and properly peeled. This has been my belief for many years. I am a retired nurse who has seen how new information is released with a bang and then slowly, over the years, problems are discovered and made public. I liked this video. Dr Bergman is someone who thinks outside the box and that's how we learn the entire effect of drugs/treatments/etc. He will probably receive a lot of criticism but anyone whoever discovered anything of worth goes thru this process. This video made sense to me. Iwill check his website soon to see what else he has to say-especially about vaccines. I was scheduled to get the shingles vaccine but will hold off til I do more research. Take care. irina1975
This makes some sense to me. I've tried all triggers people mentioned about afib, none of them did a thing to me. The only thing I noticed that's shared by all four of my episodes were reading in bed before sleeping with my neck and upper back against the headboard. After watching this video, I tried to get an appointment with Dr Bergman but the earliest availability is this November. So I found a local chiropractor to start with, who herself had palpitations two years ago and got it sorted by a chiropractor colleague, and she had also seen afib patients, though most of them are much older than me. After the initial x-ray examination, she found my neck doesn't have any natural curve, and the space are not right. Also, my T5, T6 of my spine are kind of twisted, they are not straight. I had started a plan to correct the above and will see what happens.
How interesting, thank you for sharing! I have always been baffled why my cardiologists so willingly prescribed dangerous anti arythmic meds (flecainide) causing a more serious arythmia to occur before being stopped and finally an unsuccessful ablation. All this to not allow the heart to go into exercise induced afib with RVR in my case, and yet not look to find the actual cause of the Arythmia!
Since a high school sports accident I have a known lesion on one of my thorasic verbre sighted over my adult years by radiologists, perhaps a chiropractor is my next port of call!
I watched all of it with my wife who is a nurse. He communicates well, but he has loads of repetition. To my mind he needlessly opens himself to criticism that dismisses him, by persistently using very old data. He had time to show the old papers had been confirmed by the more recent. For instance, old data for death rates is not convincing. For instance, arguing against arrhythmic drugs in general and their dangers then presenting only the worst one: Cordarone [Amiodarone] is unfair generalisation.
His main argument, repeated many times, is that AF must be considered in the wider context of the sympathetic and parasympathetic system. Agreed. Excellent stuff. Therefore in some people work on the vertebrae will help. Agreed. But some does not equal all.
Most of the video attacks existing treatments and the evidence needs updating. For his solution see the last 10-15 minutes. It is worth looking at.
He lost me when I noticed the ' in Arrhythmia's. Seriously I haven't watched all but assume he is suggesting arrhythmias might be caused by spine problems, seems logical, I wish my scoliosis correction had cured my AF!
lLowe, I agree with your comments. Unless a person has checked out this possibility for themselves, then they don't really know if it will help them. I have checked this out and I know what he says is true for me.
It always amazes me that generally people follow medical advice without much research or any questions, with all its foibles as irina1975 states; and no offence meant, but nurses often do more than most. For example, I have two sisters-in-law who are adamant chiropractic does not work even though they have no direct experience and will not even watch this video. They, and my niece pharmacist, continually tell me I cannot be getting results without drugs, a pacemaker or ablation. And this is difficult to mentally overcome when we are taught that medical advice by a professional ( Not chiropractors, they are often not professional in the eyes of mainstream medical people.) is the only correct medical advice.
It also amazes me that someone would not try a non-prescription and non-surgery solution before risking the very real dangers of both.
I posted the video in the hope that one person would explore this option. It looks like two have or might. Hopefully, others will buck the mainstream and explore this as well.
lLowe, even though I noticed all the negatives you mentioned, I suggest the first part is worth watching to enlighten people that the preferred treatments most often do not fix the cause long term, often need tweaking, with Amiordarone being one of the the radical last options, and cause lots of unwelcome health issues that significantly interrupt daily life. Maybe knowing some of this will get people to realize other choices might be something else to try.
Does anyone know of a chiropractor trained in this particular specialty? I live in South East England near Oxford but could perhaps travel, try to reach London for instance.
I was just going to ask the same thing Audrey! Annel
Yes I watched this only a few weeks ago. If you research AFib and spinal injury or trapped/ pinched nerves via Google's you do get quite a number of serious study papers, health providers studies, and personal inputs. (None related to the video) .Theremay be something in it. I have not had time to read everything and I was already booked in for an ablation anyway which I did not think I should miss. However I was interested as I damaged my neck with a motorcycle crash In 1984. It healed up on its own although looking over my right shoulder w as painful for a year ( (i think). A couple of years ago (early to mid 2015 not quite sure) I started getting problems with a stiff / painful neck possibly caused by rugby club circuit training at my age it maybe upset the old injury,. It's more than a bit clunky now still. I have had A Fib since early September 2015!!!!
I am not clear it is anything other than a coincidence yet, but if this ablation does not cure the A Fib I will looking a lot closer.
Charismatic, controversial chiropractor. Not a medical doctor.Would not be keen to let a chiropractor loose on my knackered neck. Google stroke risk from neck manipulation.
A lot of thought provoking stuff on his website.
Is there good good evidence to validate chiropractic in AF?
Oyster, also Google Mal-practice insurance for chiropractors. Who do you believe, all the people who don't quantify all the reasons why they had issues or the insurance industry?
It has taken me a few days to get through this video, so apologies for the late response. When I started watching this my immediate thoughts were:
1) Here is a sales pitch, and
2) This guy likes the sound of his own voice.
Unfortunately by the end my initial impression was unchanged.
His sales tactic is that he starts with a mass of 'science', mostly copied from the internet, and designed to impress, rather than to inform.
Next he produces one-sided propaganda against conventional medical treatments. He highlights side effects of treatment, carefully listing each one, implying that these are likely to occur, although most are extremely rare. He focuses on amiodorone which is known to be the AF medication with the most side effects, and only used as a last resort.
He constantly sneers at cardiologists and conventional treatment, ignoring the efficacy and complaining that cardiac ablation is unscientific. This is a ludicrous accusation. He has obviously never seen inside a cath lab (catheterization laboratory), and must be unaware of the enormous and overwhelming quantity of high quality scientific research into AF.
By way of a contrast the justification for the treatment he is selling appears vague and circumstantial.
In order to (credibly) claim the treatment to be safe and effective good quality randomised clinical trails need to be carried. Otherwise claims must be regarded as just wishful thinking.
It should also be borne in mind that chiropractic has its dangers. There is a great deal on the internet to this effect, represented quite well in this article: health.spectator.co.uk/the-...
"Several hundred cases have been documented in which patients were seriously and often permanently damaged after chiropractic manipulations. The latest to hit the headlines was that of a 32-year-old woman from Jakarta who died after being treated by an American chiropractor. What usually happens in these tragic instances is that, upon manipulation of the upper spine, an artery supplying the brain is over-stretched and simply breaks up, leading to a stroke which can prove fatal."
I don't want to appear negative here, but I would hate people with who perhaps do not have a strong scientific background from being deceived, and swept along by the rhetoric.
Hi Fnurd, you did appear negative. Millions of chiropractors perform thousands and thousands of adjustments every day. And some make mistakes as do many heart doctors. Most of the stroke occurrences were there waiting to happen and the chiropractic adjustment made it happen. This actually happens in very rare cases; and if the chiropractor is well qualified, they will not do an adjustment if there is risk of this happening.
I was like you very negative about chiropractors, but my experience and that of my wife over the last year has persuaded me that adjusting the neck and spine for all kinds of health reasons is worth exploring. Your are right, clinical trials have not been done and without someone like Dr. Bergman grandizing about this possibility, they will never be done. The big hurdle is there is no money to be made using this treatment. No drugs, no surgery, no elaborate hospital investment, and lots of heart doctors impacted. There could be amazing health care cost savings, but who ever really wants that. Lots of talk about it but the actions that achieve it are rather sparse. In my experience, (I know one person is not a clinical trial.) what Dr. Bergman suggests has merit and I am pretty sure it could be helpful to many others.
I am not against chiropractors in general. I use a Mctimoney chiropractor to sort out lower back issues. There is scientific evidence for the effectiveness of this specific procedure, and Mctimoney chiropractors use very small adjustments so are pretty safe.
Nor am I not saying that the treatment in the video is ineffective - I don't have an opinion one way or the other. What I am saying is that the video provides no evidence that the treatemnt is effective, and hence is misleading.
The point I was trying to make is that the video featured only the negative aspects of conventional medical treatment, without mentioning the efficacy, while selling the chiropractic benefits without mentioning the risks.
My post was an attempt to provide a rational evaluation, as I hate seeing people taken in by salesmanship in place of evidence based science.
"The big hurdle is there is no money to be made using this treatment." - except of course for the chiropractors who charge for it. There would be nothing to stop the millions of chiropractors carrying out a clinical trial.
When peoples health is involved I don't believe that "grandizing" is at all appropriate.
Incidentally do you have evidence of this: "Most of the stroke occurrences were there waiting to happen and the chiropractic adjustment made it happen."
I did not search a lot. Most sites I found are less scientific, ones of specific cases, and a bit dramatic.
These two sites probably have some merit.
webmd.com/stroke/news/20140...
This one is the most detailed and skepticism can prevail because it is a chiropractic site. It seems there is good documentation to support the conclusions.
chiro.org/LINKS/stroke.shtm...
No doubt there is some risk. There is also significant risk with other AF treatment options as there is with most medical treatments. Living is a risky business and which risk to gamble with can be a crap shoot with no guarantees. I read the following in the December 2017 issue of Science Focus. "Suffering a serious reaction to a medicine may seem rare, but is, incredibly, the fourth leading cause of death in North America, and accounts for as many as 7 percent of all hospital admissions. Again, the problem is caused by our tendency to try and treat large groups of very different people in the same way."
Even though you may think Dr. Bergman is a bit over the top with how he presents, he is a doctor who studies, observes, and is not afraid to question the status quo; and that at least, makes some of us ponder and do more research which to me is a positive.
It is my understanding, at least in Canada, that chiropractors are not allowed to say they treat heart issues and therefore would not be allowed to do a trial, except perhaps as an assist to a heart doctor lead study. My cardiologist said, if I get some useful results, he may be able to get funding to do a trial. I see him again in March.
So it would appear that the jury may still be out in terms of the magnitude of the risks of neck manipulation.
Actually the main reason I raised the safety issue was to emphasise how biased the video was, featuring every possible risk on conventional medicine, but not on neck manipulation.
Dr Bergman is not actually a Doctor at all. The title implies medical doctor or PhD. I believe he qualifies as neither. In some counties it is illegal for chiropractors to call themselvs Dr. Here in the UK the General Chiropractic Council's code of practice says: "Chiropractors who use the title of 'doctor' and who are not registered medical practitioners must ensure that they make it clear that they are registered chiropractors and not registered medical practitioners."
I don't know about regulatory issues in Canada, however I don't think there would be anything to stop a chiropractor recording appropriate detailed data in a scientific manner, and follow up patients after, say 6 months and a year in order to compare objective data on AF episodes before and after treatment. The records could be independently audited to increase credibility. Results could then be compared between before and after treatment, and with outcomes in studies of other treatments. If the data looked promising then that would be a huge help in getting support for an RCT.
Chiropractors in Canada and the US are medical doctors who have a speciality just as many other doctors. Their training is as long as a general practitioner and many take additional training. Since their specialty is not the heart; then, as applies to other doctors with a specialty, they normally don't say they treat health aspects that are other doctor's specialities. Some have additional training regarding how the nerves, that affect many body functions, are impacted by the skeleton. So they know the nerves can affect the heart but it seems they don't receive training on just how much. At least this is my experience with any chiropractors that I have met. Maybe heart doctors are very sensitive about treatments that affect such a vital organ and few "doctors' wish to challenge this.
All I know is the chiropractic treatments I have received have made a significant difference. Maybe, a certain chiropractor could do the same for others.
Burping and arrhythmia 
Is it arrhythmia or is it Afib?
Scallops and Arrhythmia
cardiac catheterisation
