If you had been, you would not have thought that an acupuncturist use
his needles to piece through the skulls of his patients in order to get
to the 8th nerve.  Your description sounds too Hollywood.

There have been a billion chiropractic adjustments?

I'm merely reporting what's in the literature, as extracted by Medline.
Perhaps you should address your comments to them.
J

It's not that cut and dried. I personally have gone to chiro's for
treatment and feel their treatment is safe but there can be
complications. There's always a problem with under-reporting
to/by the chiro and regulatory agency.
See below for some objective research conclusions
(btw, did you just guess at 3 out of 1 billion or do you have
a study that you got this from?):

****Here's what some recently published literature has to say about the
injury rates of chiropractic:

   "The most valid studies suggest that about half of all patients
will experience adverse events after chiropractic SM [spinal
manipulation]. These events are usually mild and transient. No reliable
data exist about the incidence of serious adverse events. These data
indicate that mild and transient adverse events seem to be frequent.
Serious adverse events are probably rare but their incidence can only
be estimated at present. Further prospective investigations are needed
to define their incidence more closely." (Ernst, 2001b)

Cervical spinal manipulation is generally considered to be more
dangerous than other forms of spinal manipulation, and actual rates of
injury from cervical spinal manipulations are currently unknown. While
many chiropractors state that these manipulations are safe, there are
suspicions that the injury rates are higher than currently believed.
For instance, a group of neurosurgeons in Tulsa OK wrote a paper on a
number of patients who had suffered neurological problems after
cervical spinal manipulation (Malone et al., 2002); at the end of their
paper they estimate the rate of injuries based on the population of
their geographical area, the number of cases they've seen, and the
approximate prevalence of chiropractic care:

   "Based on these data, with our local 20 patients who experienced
CSMT [cervical spinal manipulation therapy] related complication during
the study period, and assuming that 17,000 patients had undergone
cervical manipulation during the study period, then the complication
rate was approximately one irreversible complication per every 850
patients undergoing a series of manipulations in the local region of
the study. If the mean number of manipulations per patient is assumed
to be 10, then the risk of complication in this study would be one in
every 8500 cervical manipulations. Using other published data to
estimate the number of cervical manipulations in this regional
population, there could be up to 180,000 procedures annually, yielding
a complication rate of one irreversible per 45,600 cervical
manipulations. This does not take into account that our group
represents only one third of the neurosurgeons in the geographical
region around Tulsa." (emphasis mine, Malone et al., 2002)

Ernst, the author of the first paper on injury reports I quoted above,
provides more details on evaluations of chiropractic injury rates in a
comment published in Stroke (Ernst, 2001a):

   "The best way to arrive at such information [figures on the
incidence of major problems] is to prospectively study large samples of
consecutive patients. Five such investigations have been published, and
none reports a single case of a serious complication. This apparently
confirms the assumption that complications are extreme rarities. Vis a
vis the many thousand manipulations carried out daily, 200 or 300
complications in 5 years could be almost negligible. While we all hope
that this is true, one must consider underreporting: if a patient
suffers a serious complication after spinal manipulation, her
chiropractor is unlikely to see her again, and the physicians who do
might not think of a link between manipulation and the adverse effect.
And even if they consider an association, are they likely to publish
this as a case report? Moreover, none of the prospective studies
available to date have enough power to detect events that occur less
frequently than 1 in approximately 500 patients. Interestingly, most of
these studies agree that mild, transient adverse effects (eg, local
discomfort) are experienced by roughly every second patient who
receives spinal manipulation.

   "Where does this leave us when trying to critically evaluate the
safety of spinal manipulation? We know that serious complications do
exist. We also know of plausible explanations of how spinal
manipulation might lead to serious adverse events; eg, sudden
rotational and hyperextensive head movements can cause a traumatic
dissection of the extracranial arteries. The incidence of
life-threatening complications, however, is unknown, and previous
estimates have all been based on assumptions which may or may not be
true." (emphasis mine, Ernst, 2001a).

frank

Now you are a posture and bone specialist too Murray?

Go back in your dark practice and don't come back.

many people with a knee injury have worn cartilage (meniscus) that
makes one leg shorter then the other.