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The Association of New Jersey Chiropractors (ANJC), which represents over 1,600 chiropractors statewide, is pleased with the vote in the New Jersey State Senate and General Assembly that ushers in a new scope of practice for chiropractic care in the state for the first time since 1953.
ANJC has been working closely in a bipartisan manner with state legislators over the past five years to enact passage of this long overdue scope of practice change, which enhances the way chiropractors treat and manage patients. There are over 3000 chiropractors actively practicing in New Jersey who will benefit.
"This new scope of practice is not only historic for the chiropractic profession in New Jersey but, most importantly, serves as a victory for the one million patients we treat statewide each year who benefit from chiropractic care," said Dr. Steven Clarke, President of the ANJC.
Several new components legislated by this new scope of practice:
- Requires chiropractors to maintain medical malpractice liability insurance.
- Requires chiropractors to complete 30 credits for continuing education every two years, with two credits focusing on ethics and record keeping, and two credits in nutrition education.
- Permits chiropractors to provide dietary/nutritional counseling and the ability to dispense nutritional supplements. Although taught in chiropractic colleges, New Jersey has been the only state not to allow this as part of their practice.
- Places into statue that chiropractors can adjust extremities independent of spinal subluxations. This is pursuant to a 2008 New Jersey Supreme Court ruling stating that it is within the chiropractic scope of practice to adjust extremities beyond the spinal column per regulations enacted by the New Jersey State Board of Chiropractors as well as numerous Board pronouncements over the past two decades.
"We've been operating under the most archaic scope of practice in the country. Since New Jersey last amended the chiropractic scope of practice in 1953, most of what chiropractors have been currently allowed to do is provided in regulation and in case law, but hadn't been placed into statute. This legislation now puts those regulations and case laws into statute,'' added Clarke.
— ANDY LAGOMARSINO, NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Manipulations are often used as a 1st approach, most of the time they are not needed for even spinal pain. Too much to write here about it.
You can't adjust a spine that is made to be naturally asymmetrical. What is palpated as a rotation could simply be the shape of the vertebra itself; intertester reliability (findings from one examiner to the next) are always poor in the study's.
You can't treat disease processes with spinal manips or adjustments. It's not part of real anatomy and physiology, but the religion of chiropractic will insist is does.
Chiropractors are not extremity experts. There are a host of problems that accrue in extremities which take a long time to learn how to treat, yet with the strike of a pen, they are automatically granted rights to treat areas beyond their scope of practice.
Unfortunately, our society makes decisions based upon the number of votes an elected official can acquire; hence, science has little to do with anything. I would suggest the reader 'google' chirotalk. it's a discussion site for chiropractors who have come to learn that their profession is sadly lacking in the world of science and is functioning mostly off of religious belief. Also see Quackwatch.com. When a web site becomes notorious for exposing health fraud, it is automatically condemned by those who consider it one-sided or the authors become 'known' as antagonists.' Little weight is even by detractors to the actual information, so when you tell others you are reviewing quackwatch.com, you are surely going to be told what a whacko Dr. Barrett is when the opposite is actually true.