Dr. Perle's letter to the editor on chiro-spam e-mails.http://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=5453

Healey, Stephen

Perle, Stephen M.

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Chiro-Spam: Refecting Poorly On Our Profession

We Get Letters & E-MailChiro-Spam: Reflecting Poorly on Our ProfessionDear Editor: We are certain that everyone in the chiropractic profession is barraged by spam - useless and intrusivee-mail. Everyone with an e-mail address likely receives offers for cheap drugs, get-rich-quick schemes,sex-oriented advertisements, and other garbage. Weeding though these e-mails is a major annoyance andleaves one wondering who actually replies to them, since without responses those sending them wouldeventually stop.  There is another class of spam that we chiropractors receive: e-mail from practice-management companies,chiropractic equipment suppliers, chiropractic "philosophy" and motivational messages, and e-mail for otherpurportedly valuable services. Arguably for some doctors in practice, these solicitations may occasionallyprove useful. But none of them are of value to either of us, and we suspect are not typically useful fordoctors in practice. For one of us, a chiropractor who teaches at the University of Bridgeport’s College of Chiropractic and isnot currently practicing [Dr. Perle], these e-mails are sheer annoyance. None offers anything useful to achiropractic college professor and researcher. Unlike e-mails from book publishers or the statistics softwarecompanies, which may have some value, these e-mails focus on originating, keeping and managing patientsthrough practice management, EMR software, or billing for services.  For the other of us, who teaches religious studies and is currently serving as an administrator at UB [Dr.Healey], chiro-spam falls into a completely different realm. However, these e-mails have no conceivablebenefit for him, either. Why do they even come to him? It’s worth asking why our profession tolerates thistype of spamming, since they shed negative light on our work. Since these e-mails are sent toBridgeport.edu e-mail addresses, without regard to fields of study, they raise questions about whether theuniversity’s academic mission is understood.- 1 -Though the College of Chiropractic has been at the University of Bridgeport for 19 years, the e-mail blastsshow that many in the profession do not understand that UB is a comprehensive university and that thechiropractic college is one of its 12 academic units.  There are approximately 200 chiropractic students atUB and 5,000 graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in nearly 90 certificate, degree, and non-degreeprograms. Yet chiropractic spammers collect e-mail addresses from the UB Web site and spam theuniversity’s psychologists, accountants, historians, engineers, sociologists, physicists, and others. This goes beyond being annoying to sending the message to non-chiropractic colleagues that our practice isof the fly-by-night variety. It certainly doesn’t present the chiropractic profession in a positive light. Thoughthe university offers an MBA in accounting, for example, neither of us can recall receiving accounting-typespam, unless one includes proposals to accept multimillion-dollar advances from a bank in Nigeria for asmall up-front fee. Ditto for most of the other professions represented at UB. Chiropractic spam leads thepack in being persistent, intrusive and useless.In Wilk v AMA, the AMA’s case revolved around showing some unethical methods of practice-buildingemployed by the chiropractic profession. That, in essence, is what this sort of e-mail is, and that is themessage being received by our colleagues at UB. How many non-DCs outside of UB receive this material?What is the cumulative damage to the chiropractic profession? We believe the damage is significant and thatit contributes to an image of the chiropractor as tenuously professional.We doubt that this missive will cause even one chiro-spammer to scrub its mailing list of non-DCs, or tosend its e-mail only to DCs who have requested it, but we might convince one or more chiropracticprofessionals to play a role in advocating for the elimination of such spam. In working as chiropracticprofessionals, as doctors who treat patients and who educate a wider public about the value of chiropracticcare, it’s the right thing to do. If you think so, too, send us an e-mail at perle  bridgeport.edu.Stephen Perle, DC, MSStephen Healey, PhDUniversity of Bridgeportperle  bridgeport.eduPage printed from: http://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=54531&no_paginate=true&p_friendly=true&no_b=true- 2 -

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Chiro-Spam: Refecting Poorly On Our Profession

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