Katie May, Chiropractic Care

There has been talk in our offices about the tragic death of Katie May, the Playboy model that was ruled as an accidental death from stroke after seeing a chiropractor.  Since I was not there and I'm sure there is information I may be unaware of, I just wanted to give everyone some information that I DO know about stroke and chiropractic care.  So for all you folks who enjoy studies and information, this is for you:

In 2008, Cassidy, Boyle, Côté, He, Hogg-Johnson, Silver, and Bondy  studied the occurrence of this problem in the province of Ontario over a nine year period with a database representing almost 110 million person-years (12.2 million people, studied over 9 years equals 110 million person-years). The purpose of this study was to investigate if an association between chiropractic care and vertebral basilar artery stroke exceeded the association between medical primary care providers and vertebral basilar artery stroke. The premise was that if there was a greater association between chiropractic care and this stroke then one could logically say there was a cause and effect relationship between chiropractic care and this problem. There was no greater likelihood of a patient experiencing a stroke following a visit to his/her chiropractor than there was after a visit to his/her primary care physician. The results were conclusive; there was no greater association between manipulation (chiropractic adjustments) and ischemic stroke or TIA's (transient ischemic attacks).

The research did conclude that overall, 4% of stroke victims had visited a chiropractor within 30 days of their strokes, while 53% of the stroke cases had visited their medical primary care providers within the same time frame. The authors offer the perspective that because neck pain is associated with some stroke, patients visit their doctors prior to the development of a full-blown stroke scenario. Cassidy et al. (2008) noted, "Because the association between chiropractic visits and [vertebral basilar artery] stroke is not greater than the association between PCP [medical primary care providers] visits and [vertebral basilar] stroke, there is no excess risk of [vertebral basilar] stroke from chiropractic care" (p. S180). In fact, the incident of chiropractic vs. medical care was substantially lower in certain situations based upon the data.
There is more information out there and if you want to read more studies, feel free to follow our link:

Studies on Chiropractic