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| In 1975, Ronald Pero, Ph.D, chief of cancer prevention research at New York's Preventive Medicine Institute and professor of medicine in Environmental Health at New York University, began developing scientific valid ways to estimate individual susceptibility to various chronic diseases. An individual's immune system responsiveness, or "immune competence," also was directly linked to certain DNA repairing enzymes, which provided an objective way to assess disease susceptibility. Pero was also fascinated by the synergistic relationship between various hormones with other cancer inducing agents to promote disease. If thyroid produces too much of either thyroxine or thyroid stimulating hormone, cancer risk greatly increases. The nervous system regulates hormone balances; it too can influence susceptibility to cancer. Along these lines, various kinds of spinal cord injury are accompanied by a high risk of developing cancer. Joseph Flesia, D.C., chairman of the board of directors from the Chiropractic Basic Science Research Foundation, collaborated with Pero in 1986. Measuring 107 individuals who had received long-term chiropractic care, Pero's team determined that all chiropractic patients were "genetically normal"; they had no obvious genetic reasons for increased resistance or susceptibility to disease. Using Pero's test to gauge resistance to hazardous environmental chemicals, they hypothesized that people with cancer would have a suppressed immune response to such a toxic burden, while healthy people and people receiving chiropractic care should have a relatively enhanced response. The chiropractic patients had 200 percent greater immune competence than the people that had not received chiropractic, and 400 percent greater immune competence than people with cancer or other serious diseases. Despite a wide range of ages the immune competence did not show a decline with age.The effects of chiropractic seemed uniform for the entire group. |