I decided to start the chiropracticlive forum in 2005 to expose the outrageous behaviour of GCC officers and give chiropractors a chance to speak out. General apathy and fear meant the chiropractic profession did not take advantage of the opportunity.…
Author: Richard Lanigan
Richard Lanigan DC.BSc (Chiro) MSc( Health Promotion) was born in North London 1957 of Irish Parents and was educated in Ireland. Originally trained as a PE teacher, he moved to Denmark 1979, where a serious knee injury got him interested in rehabilitation and training methods. Richard founded Denmarks premier fitness centre "Sweat Shop" in 1982 and travelled all over the world to find how best to prepare athletes for competition. In 1984 he became fitness and rehab consultant to the Danish national badminton teams, handball teams and many football club sides. This approach to optimal performance is normal in 2010, however back in the early 80s it was very revolutionary, when stretching was limited to putting on your socks and knee injuries were immobilised for months in plaster. Richard developed rehabilitation and fitness programmes for many of Denmark’s top athletes including Kirsten Larsten and Ib Frederickson, all England singles badminton champions in late 80s. "Team Denmark" hired him and his facilities to help prepare many of Denmarks athletes for the LA and Seoul Olympics. In 1990 he worked with Anya Anderson, Olympic gold medallist and voted worlds best female handball player at the Atlanta Olympics. Richard advised Copenhagen’s main teaching (Rigs) Hospital on starting their rehab facility in 1984. In the same year he started working with Denmarks leading chiropractor; Ole Wessung DC, who demonstrated the effectiveness of Chiropractic in improving athletic performance, so impressed was Richard that in 1990 he moved back to England to study chiropractic at Anglo European College of Chiropractic and was student president for two years between 1993-1995. Richard was awarded a fellowship by the College of Chiropractors in 2008, however in January 2009 Richard chose to stop using the title chiropractor in the UK because the British regulatory body for chiropractic (The GCC) had not maintained international standards of chiropractic education in the UK and including prescribing medicines in the chiropractic scope of practice, a fig leaf for incompetent UK chiropractors to hide behind. Richard has another clinic in Dublin and is a member of the Chiropractic Association of Ireland and the European Chiropractic Union. Richard has four children Eloise aged 3, Molly and Isabelle aged five and the eldest Frederik aged twenty one is pursuing a career as a professional tennis player and has represented Norway in the Davis Cup in 2006 & 2007. None of Richards children have ever taken any medicine, www.vaccination.co.uk they eat healthy food, take lots of exercise and have their spines checked every month, www.familychiropractic.co.uk Richard has had much experience working in the Cuban health service where Doctors are keen to incorporate drug free interventions (acupuncture and chiropractic) and prevention in their health care programmes www.henryreevebrigade.org
The GCC vision for chiropractic
Over a hundred years ago DD Palmer the founder of Chiropractic presented his hypothesis, that there was a relationship between the function of the nervous system and wellbeing, while we now know his "bone out of place" theory was wrong,…
Margaret Coats could care less about the chiropractic profession
Published with the permission of Hagan McQuaid former President of the Chiropractic Association of Ireland. His letter is from 2004. This letter should bring comfort to Chiropractic sceptics who are hoping to put BCA professional indemnity insurance through the roof.…
How much is the body politic going to cost us all
How Much is the Body Politic Going to Cost us all? By Richard Lanigan DC THE BCAs “PROFESSIONAL STATEMENT” FURTHER DIVIDES THE PROFESSION These should be great times for the chiropractic profession, but we continue to waste energy and resources…
GCC and BCA member David Byfield does not like people having free speech.
The BCA council likes disciplinary hearings because it is an easy way to intimidate and silence dissenters. BCA disciplinary hearings are always held behind closed doors, the defendant is not allowed to be present or have representation. Sometimes you are…
David Byfield is either biased or incompetent?
2001 was when I really got involved in the politics of the General Chiropractic Council (GCC), was asked to be the expert witness for Jesper Jensen who had written stuff on his website that the GCC did not like. I…
Original Report; Jensen V GCC, scope of chiropractic practice.
This is the initial report I prepared in relation to the initial 65 pages of GCC charges against Jesper Jenson which were written by GCC “expert” Dafid Byfield in an effeort to define GCC scope of practice. Having read my…
Before blind ambition messed up his brain GCC chairman Peter Dixon sounded like a reasonable chiropractor
Peter Dixon can sound very reasonable. He will look you in the eye tell you exactly what you want to hear and go and tell someone else what they want to hear, the fact that this may be the completely…
BCA member Richard Rummary resigns from General Chiropractic Council
Alligators
One of the original members of the GCC, BCA member Richard Rumary resigned from the GCC on 18 June 2000. Richard was a solicitor before he trained as a chiropractor. His decision was brought to a head by the investigating committee’s decision to pursue chiropractors for advising people to stop taking NSAIDs, saying it was tantamount to “penalising dentists for telling people that eating sweets was bad for their teeth”.
According to Richard Rumary, the view of chiropractic on the GCC would appear to be out of line with the views held by the large majority of chiropractors in the UK. Seven years on GCC members seem to have learned nothing, in fact their prosecution rate has increased. Richard sent this letter to GCC members and gave me a copy. He wrote
“The underlying reason for my resignation was that I had reached the point where I no longer felt able to subscribe to the principle of “collective responsibility”.
The principle not only made me an unwilling party to many decisions taken by Council on matters relating to the regulation of the profession, but also prevented me from expressing my disagreement with those decisions outside Council.
I did not resign at an earlier stage because I accepted that it is a difficult task to set up a regulatory body from scratch, especially when that task involves uniting individuals from many different backgrounds under a lay chairman with no experience of chiropractic education, training or practice. In such circumstances, I knew that some compromises would have to be made along the way. But there is a limit to the number of times that anyone can compromise.
My main objection to the way in which Council has operated, and continues to operate, is that it is dominated by members (and staff) who have a very rigid and essentially ‘orthodox-medical’ view of the way in which chiropractors should be educated trained and allowed to practice. These members are either professional members with their own particular educational or political agenda, or lay members who either know nothing about the real nature of chiropractic or seem to have an in-built bias against it.
The result has been a determination on the part of Council not only to interpret the “grandfather” provisions of the Chiropractors Act 1994 in such a way as to obstruct and in some cases actually to prevent the conditional registration of many chiropractors or chiropractic graduates, but also, through its Education Committee, to impose a curriculum for the colleges, and propose requirements for CPD and provisional registration, which are unnecessarily onerous and inappropriate, having regard to the essential nature of chiropractic.
This determination inevitably means also that the Investigating Committee and the Professional Conduct Committee are likely to take decisions – and in the case of the Investigating Committee has already taken decisions – which are based on either a rigid, or an incomplete or a biased view of the nature of chiropractic.
My lesser objections are to the way in which Council has operated relate to its refusal to be open about mistakes which have been made; its intention to become involved in the publication of clinical guidelines despite the limited resources of both expertise and finance at its disposal; its decision to appoint only lay members to be chairmen of the statutory committees; its failure to record adequately the debate at its meetings, and its insensitivity to the profession’s perception of its expenditure.
In my view, the overall approach of the Council is unlikely to change until there is an election of the chiropractic members to replace the current chiropractic members, and with the opportunity to appoint a chiropractor in place of the current chairman.
Only when this happens will there be, in my view, any chance of Council adopting a more realistic and fair approach to the effective regulation of the profession”.
Fast forward to 2009: Hindsight is a great thing, the failure of the British Chiropractic Association to act on Richard Rummary’s warning resulted in a more polarised profession and a regulator that would go after 900 BCA chiropractors this was my Video take on the GCCs subsequent actions.
