Vitalist therapeutics seeks to strengthen the patient's powers of resistance and compensate for the predisposition to become ill. That is one reason why allopathic medicine is now considered the third or fourth leading cause of death in the United States. This figure accounts for nearly 5 percent of all causes of recorded death in that year. However, only 156 death certificates listed ADRs as the cause of death. About 180,000 die from medical malpractice, including missed diagnoses, medication mishaps and other preventable errors.
Medical errors account for up to a quarter of the deaths from heart attack, stroke and pneumonia.
Childhood vaccinations are now being questioned as a possible factor behind the explosive increases in dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, allergies, asthma, autism, arthritis, leukemia, brain cancers and other conditions that were quite rare before mass immunization. However, there are those chiropractors who, during this tumultuous transition period, appear willing to renounce the philosophy, science and art that our chiropractic forefathers fought and struggled for in order to create a separate and distinct profession. Instead, they rush to embrace the failed and failing mechanistic approach to health and disease. They wish to go as far as to create guidelines based on medical standards to define chiropractic practice. In our desire to create chiropractic guidelines, we must first determine the most effective instrument by which to judge this empirical or vitalist healing art.