Beware the Spinal Trap

Bristol Spine
Today, numerous blogs and magazines from all around the world will publish Simon Singh’s article on chiropractic from April 2008, with the libellous part removed. The Guardian withdrew the article after the British Chiropractic Association sued for libel (please reblog).


BEWARE THE SPINAL TRAP

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results – and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.
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The impact of cranial plasticity on the reconstruction of human population history

parallelism
Palaeoanthropologists are interested in reconstructing the evolutionary history of our species from fossil remains. Like other taxonomists they are primarily interested in identifying shared derived traits, otherwise known as synapomorphies. A synapomorphic trait is shared by some members of a taxa and not by others, since the former inherited this trait from a common ancestor. For instance, the retention of a clavicle (collar bone) is one of the more cited synapomorphic traits common to all primates.

A homoplasy is a trait that is present in two or more taxa but that has not been derived through common ancestry but rather through convergence, parallelism, or reversal. The wings of insects, birds and bats are homoplasies, since they arose through convergent evolution. Thus, homoplasies and synapomorphies may be identical in appearance but are distinguished by whether or not they arose through common ancestry. As a result, it can often difficult to pry apart traits which are synapomorphies from those which are homoplasies. A subset of homoplasies are termed homoiologies. Lycett and Collard (2005) define homoiologies as:

“… phylogenetically misleading resemblances among a group of taxa that can be ascribed to phenotypic plasticity. That is, homoiologies are homoplasies that result from the expression by a genotype of different phenotypes in response to different environmental conditions.” Read More...
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