Aliron Completes Pilot Study Under Budget

Congress mandates more therapy for military personnel after
Chiropractic Demonstration Project produces positive results

When the US Department of Defense (DoD) contracted Aliron International to implement a program to test the feasibility of incorporating chiropractic therapy into the military medical care system, it didn't expect the small Washington, DC, company to return some of the money at the end of the three-year demonstration project. "I had given DoD my personal guarantee that we would return any funds we didn't use," says Aliron President Cora Alisuag. "After all, the money belonged to the American public."

Aliron's success in completing the chiropractic project under budget resulted from its ability to keep costs and overhead as low as possible without sacrificing the quality of the work. Having received the contract in early 1995 after the DoD directed its military branches to open their doors to civilian chiropractors at ten bases throughout the country, Aliron was tasked with the goal of determining whether such therapy could bring relief to US military personnel with back problems in a cost-effective manner.

For each of the ten bases, Aliron recruited two chiropractors and two chiropractic assistants. Each doctor saw 20 patients a day and, initially, each patient returned for therapy twice a week for a period of up to four weeks.

After the demonstration project was extended for a fourth year and three more bases were added to the program, military authorities spent a year studying the data collected by the doctors and compared the results to traditional medical models for treating back problems. The project findings were that 82.9 percent of the military personnel who were treated by the chiropractors reported good results, while 50.7 percent of the patients who had traditional medical therapy reported similar success.

As a result of the study, on October 1, 2001, Congress mandated that the military phase in chiropractic therapy throughout its entire health care system over a five-year period. The program that Aliron helped to develop continues to serve patients at the 13 original test sites.