RES EARCH
Dr. Hawk earned her Doctor of Chiropractic degree in 1976, and practiced full-time for 12 years before attending the University of Iowa to earn her PhD in Preventive Medicine. Before stepping into her new role, Dr. Hawk had served as Logan’s director of clinical research since 2010. Previously, she was the vice president of research and scholarship at Cleveland Chiropractic College in Kansas City, Mo., as well as the dean of research at Southern California University of Health Sciences. In December 2012, Dr. Hawk was awarded a $750,000 Standard Process® Inc. competitive research grant comparing the short- and long-term effect of chiropractic care combined with a specific nutritional supplement regimen to chiropractic care. It was the first research grant awarded by Standard Process. However, even with 37 years of experience and more than 20 years in clinical research, Dr. Hawk said there are many challenges to putting research into practice. The number one problem she has to overcome: lack of data. Simply put, there hasn’t been much research conducted on preventive medicine or using chiropractic care for wellness, Dr. Hawk said. “It’s really difficult to prove that somebody did not get sick thanks to a specific treatment,” she said. “That takes large studies with thousands of people.” And large studies with thousands of people cost millions of dollars—the type of funding that is almost impossible to secure for research into preventive or complementary and alternative health care. So, Dr. Hawk is working on something new.
A research-rich environment She envisions a future where the entire Logan campus serves as a testing bed and
“One of the most important considerations for the future of chiropractic care is ensuring that chiropractors find ways to collaborate with other fields of medicine ... this kind of multidisciplinary approach will allow chiropractic to work more closely with physical assistants, therapists and the wider health care system.” an ongoing research project to transform chiropractic—looking for ways to grow the profession and to incorporate other complementary and alternative health care practices into the field. “Research is supposed to serve as an integral part of an institution,” Dr. Hawk said. “All schools are trying to say that, but it’s not true right now.” By studying the reported outcomes of the patients who use Logan’s health centers, and by enrolling students and professors on campus to gather data, Dr. Hawk said Logan could truly make research a cornerstone of Logan’s mission. Furthermore, it would set Logan apart as a leader among its peers. And with that amount of data, researchers would have numbers and solid evidence that could be leveraged to attract more grant funding. With substantial data, researchers could leverage more grant funding, and with an entire campus of students and professors on board, Dr. Hawk believes Logan’s research department could do for chiropractic what the Framingham study did for medicine.
A long-running and ongoing study of the entire population of the town of Framingham, Mass., the Framingham study has provided much of what science has learned about cardiovascular care and the risk factors for heart disease throughout the past 50 years. The study is in its third generation, having started in 1948 with more than 5,000 subjects. “I always tell students, ‘Wouldn’t it have been nice if they would have asked about chiropractic care?’ We could have followed these people over the past 50 years and determined if chiropractic may have been a protective factor. Those are the kinds of studies we really need,” Dr. Hawk said.
Forging new relationships One of the most important considerations for the future of chiropractic care is ensuring that chiropractors find ways to collaborate with other fields of medicine, Dr. Hawk said. She is impressed and encouraged by the collaborations and connections that Logan’s Dr. Dennis Enix, research faculty associate professor, and Radiology Department Chair Dr. Norman Kettner have made with prestigious medical schools, such as Saint Louis University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the primary teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. In the future, this kind of multidisciplinary approach will allow chiropractors to work more closely with physical assistants, therapists and the wider broader health care system. “Everybody is interested in how we can manage pain without the use of addictive drugs,” Dr. Hawk said. “And in order for us to expand chiropractic, we need that outcome data. We need to be able to demonstrate that what we do is more effective and safer than surgeries and pain pills.”
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