To: bovik@ROBIN.WARP.CS.CMU.EDU
Subject: Alan Berman
Return-Receipt-To: davide@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu
Precedence: special-delivery
Work-Phone: +1 412 268 8101
Work-Fax: +1 412 268 5576
Home-Phone: +1 412 344 9540
Reply-To: David.Eckhardt@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 96 14:36:49 -0400
From: David_Eckhardt@ROBIN.WARP.CS.CMU.EDU

I was going through your chiropractor database hoping somebody would
have reviewed a South Hills practitioner when I saw many glowing
recommendations for Alan Berman in Greenfield.  I saw him a couple of
years ago for wrist pain on Bruce Horn's enthusiastic advice, and I'm
sorry to say I don't trust him.

To start out with, he X-rayed my torso, with an ancient-looking
machine.  I strongly suspect that recommended radiation exposure levels
have drastically decreased since his machine was built (if you go
there, you might ask him when that was).

He then attempted to show that the genesis of my wrist pain was
mis-alignment in my spine by drawing and connecting dots on the X-ray.
Unfortunately for his theory, my spine and shoulders were straight and
perpendicular.  He "adjusted" my spine and limbs.  It was spectacular
but not clearly useful.

On my second visit, he again adjusted various parts of my body, and
then put me on a heat/massage bed and hooked me up to a machine which
sent electrical pulses down my arm.  I asked him what voltage the
machine used, and he gave me an answer like "6,000 megahertz" (bzzt,
sorry, thank you for playing).

I decided against a third visit.

People seem to like him, so I suspect there is some set of common
ailments he can diagnose and cure.  What I found disturbing was his
determination that he could fix nearly anything:  some wrist pain is in
fact due to inflamed tendons and cartilage, not mis-aligned spines, but
he seemed pretty firmly in the "If all you have is a hammer, everything
looks like a nail" camp.

Two minor points:  he had on his wall a poster that said "subluxations
causes pain...injury...death" ("subluxation" is a chiropractic term
which, as far as I can tell, means "dark spot on an X-ray"); his wife
sent me advertisements for colonic irrigations (hosing our your lower
intestine to make you healthy and happy) for a few months after I
stopped going there.

I'm not anti-chiropractor per se.  There are, after all, M.D.'s who
have gone to chiropractic schools to get certified, and there are many
happy customers, so there is almost certainly something there.  But I
think I'd prefer to see somebody with something resembling scientific
training (seemingly missing in some chiropractors' training) and some
idea of the limits of his knowledge (of course, some M.D.'s have
trouble with this, too).  For example, a friend of mine has recommended
a chiropractor, Cleveland Brown, in part because he gave up on her
problem and sent her to an M.D.

Dave Eckhardt
P.S. My wrists are better, though not cured, despite the efforts of a
chiropractor and a physical therapist.  Typing with the keyboard on my
lap has made all the difference.