Curriden successfully defends chiropractor
Dale Curriden, an attorney at The Van Winkle Law Firm in Asheville, has successfully defended a Union County chiropractor against a $1.5-million medical malpractice suit brought by a hairdresser and her husband alleging battery, negligence and loss of marital relations. After a nearly four-week trial, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the chiropractor on all counts.
Monroe resident Terry Purser Carter alleged that in 2004, Dr. Mark Fishel performed chiropractic adjustments on her against her will and sent her home although she was complaining of pain, nausea and dizziness. She claimed the adjustment caused bilateral vertebral artery dissections, or tears in the lining of the vessels that travel along both sides of the spine in the neck area. Carter said the injury left her unable to work.
In addition to the compensation for medical expenses, pain and suffering, and permanent injury sought by Carter, her husband joined in the suit, alleging loss of marital relations.
Represented by Van Winkle attorney Dale Curriden, Dr. Fishel presented chiropractic and neurosurgery experts who testified that the dissection was likely an existing condition that caused the headache and neck pain for which Carter had sought medical care prior to visiting Dr. Fishel, and which led her to seek chiropractic care in the first place. They argued that the force involved in chiropractic adjustments is nowhere near the force required to injure a healthy vertebral artery, and that if there had been sufficient force to injure the artery, there would have been damage to the surrounding bone and/or tissues.
In his testimony, Dr. Fishel said he would never perform chiropractic adjustments on a patient against their will and that the adjustments the plaintiff described – with Dr. Fishel allegedly grabbing Carter’s chin and forcefully twisting her head from side to side – do not match any chiropractic treatment with which he is familiar. In addition, Carter’s sworn testimony that she had been unable to perform any work since treatment was contradicted by video footage of her at work on numerous occasions after her visit to Dr. Fishel.
“This is a very important case for the chiropractic community,” said Curriden. “For decades, there has been a running debate in the medical and chiropractic communities about the safety of chiropractic care to the neck and whether such care can cause dissections and strokes. Chiropractors and others have argued that neck adjustments are safe and effective and that any association with dissections and strokes — in addition to being extremely rare — is a result of the fact that people with undiagnosed, spontaneous dissections which have not yet evolved to the point of causing a stroke are likely to experience headache and neck pain, prompting them to seek chiropractic care.
“Prior to the onset of a stroke, there is no easy way for a chiropractor or any medical doctor to distinguish the very rare case of a dissection from the much more common types of headache and neck pain, and chiropractic care is no more likely to aggravate an underlying dissection than any number of other normal movements of the head and neck.”
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