Thanks for your personal marvelous posting! I really enjoyed reading it, you will be a great author. I will ensure that I bookmark your blog and will come back sometime soon. I want to encourage you to continue your great work, have a nice holiday week…

I do find myself in agreement with you that single studies of small populations without control groups are weak arguments for efficacy of treatment.

In my own practice we make very few claims for chiropractic efficacy apart from pain relief and improved mobility for certain musculo-skeletal complaints – well documented and readily apparent phenomenon.

It would be interesting to examine other established medical sub-specialities with the same skeptical rigor, the claims and practices of podiatry for an example.

Grant Stowell, D.C.

==> 112.200.197.24 advertised for chiros in Alberta (CA), St. Louis (MO, US), and Seattle (WA, US).
==> 112.200.212.52 advertised a Boise (ID, US) chiro.

Another blogger who goes by “Skepticat” has a post on her site that has received comments from the same computers. Check her post entitled “Chiropractic is crap.”

The advantage to hiring someone to drop comments is that the referred-to Web sites (e.g., “Earth Services”) will appear at or near the top of a list of sites one gets when one searches for “earth services” and location (e.g., Alberta, St. Louis, etc.). Paying for such a service increases the chances that one’s “service” (e.g., chiropractic) will harvest customers (AKA ‘patients’) from Internet searches.

As you and other savvy readers probably know, Zeno, one can purchase the services of blog commenting services. These are companies that promise to promote clients’ Web sites. I don’t know whether they work from lists or use an alert system to find target sites for posting, but the service at least boarders on spamming, it seems to me.

A very interesting question, as I see it, is who is paying for this service. I could buy one personally to help promote LD Blog, but then the workers would be surfing about posting only about it. In this case, the apparent blog commenting service is posting references to multiple (related) sites. Perhaps the chiropractors at these sites have banded together to purchase a commenting service. Perhaps a chiropractic association provides the service for its members. Perhaps…perhaps…perhaps.

I spent a few minutes poking through the Web site of one organization. (I note with admiration that you and your colleagues have investigated a lot of bogus claims.) I didn’t locate any direct evidence of the American Chiropractic Association funding such an effort; such evidence might show up in the minutes of meetings of the executive board or in tax returns that are supposed to be made pubic (“990 Returns”). However, there were references to “PR Tools & Tips” and to a members-only mailing list which might, potential sources of evidence about advertising strategies.

For grins, I’ll check with Skepticat. We can compare the IP addresses for the commenters.

However, I don’t want to get away from the focus of this message and others on LD Blog: Those who advocate chiropractic treatment for Learning Disabilities and other education problems do no have evidence that those treatments are effective.