2002

I read with interest Dr G. Henderson’s comments [in BCMJ 2002;44(3):116] regarding my President’s message in the January edition of the BC College of Family Physicians’ newsletter. I am sorry he does not share my views. I am convinced that much of the increasing dissatisfaction being experienced these days by our profession is due to at least a partial loss of that altruistic tendency that has accompanied the practice of medicine in years past.

I read with interest (BCMJ 2002;44[2]:68) Dr Woolley’s typically articulate rebuttal to my earlier letter expressing my sadness over the disappearance of vaginal breech delivery. My thoughts wandered back to several occasions when I was called urgently to the case room to help with the delivery of an undiagnosed breech.

Mainstream peer-reviewed medical/scientific journals rarely seem to publish articles on complementary/alternative medical (CAM) topics. This appears to be a paradox if we are to believe the statistics about the wide acceptance of these treatments by the public. If one does a quick trip into MEDLINE or PubMed and looks at any number of CAM topics, few of them appear in anything but journals dedicated to CAM.

No longer is whiplash a pain in the neck, but rather an enigma, a puzzling riddle that has grown beyond the simplistic popular model that states, “If it hurts and it’s in the neck, it must be whiplash.” As with any riddle, the challenge to solve it has been taken up by many, thus the enigma of whiplash cannot be reduced to one edition; here, we have two. In this first edition, we’ll start with incidence. The epidemiologist (Galasko) has attempted to tell us how many are whiplashed, but there is no standard.

Introduction