VA OKs chiropractic care but keeps primary care oversight

For the first time in 25 years, Veterans Affairs adds a licensed independent health care profession to its roster.

By Myrle Croasdale, AMNews staff. April 19, 2004.

It's official. The Dept. of Veterans Affairs will include chiropractors in its network of health care professionals, and patients will have access to them through any of the VA's physicians and other health care professionals. But primary care physicians will retain ultimate oversight of patient care.

This decision ends the debate on how patients will access chiropractic care at the VA. In March, VA Secretary Anthony Principi announced that the department had agreed with most of an advisory committee's recommendations on implementing a federal law enacted in 2001 that requires at least one facility in each of the VA's 21 regional health center networks to provide chiropractic care.

"We recommended that chiropractors be like any other member of the system," said Michael Murphy, DO, a member of the committee and past adviser for the Defense Dept. chiropractic health care demonstration project. "They get equity as a health care provider. It'll be a level playing field."

Chiropractors, who have been part of the Defense Dept. health care system since 1996, see this as a hard-fought victory. Reed Phillips, DC, PhD, committee chair and president of Southern California University of Health Sciences, said the profession had been trying to gain access to the VA since World War I.

"This is a big step forward, but we're not there yet," Dr. Phillips said.

The next leg of the journey includes developing education programs to inform patients and VA staff of the new services and how patients can access them.