A 34-year-old Mount Adams woman has filed a negligence lawsuit against a Cincinnati-area chiropractic practice, claiming a neck adjustment in May 2024 left her with a torn artery and multiple strokes. Casey Knotts' lawsuit names Mt. Lookout Chiropractic along with chiropractors William Cornett and Donna Maloney, and the defendants have denied the allegations.
According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Knotts went to Mt. Lookout Chiropractic Center on May 22, 2024, seeking a neck adjustment after months of neck pain. The lawsuit alleges that she fainted, fell off the treatment table and then vomited five times following the procedure. Head CTs at Christ Hospital reportedly showed evidence of a tear in the inner lining of her vertebral artery, and doctors determined after clinical tests and MRIs that she suffered multiple strokes as a result of the chiropractic manipulation, according to court documents cited in the report.
Knotts' lawsuit alleges that Cornett and Maloney deviated from chiropractic standards of care and failed to properly evaluate her neck injury before administering treatment. The complaint also includes a more pointed allegation: that Cornett amended Knotts' electronic medical record seven times on the day she was treated for stroke symptoms, per her attorney's claim in the filing. The defendants deny all of the allegations in the suit.
What the Lawsuit Is Seeking
Knotts is seeking punitive damages to cover the cost of her injuries and future care, along with court costs and attorneys' fees, the Enquirer's report states. No independent court filing or docket record was made available to verify the lawsuit's procedural status beyond what has been reported, and no settlement or outcome has been confirmed.
What the Broader Research Shows
Cases like Knotts' sit inside a larger, unsettled scientific debate about whether neck manipulation can trigger artery dissections and strokes. A 2017 case-crossover study of 15,523 carotid artery stroke cases in Ontario, published by sciencedirect.com, found positive associations between both chiropractic visits and primary-care visits and subsequent stroke in patients under 45 — with no significant difference between the two types of visits. That same study found no association at all between chiropractic visits and stroke in people 45 or older, and its authors concluded there was no excess risk of carotid artery stroke after chiropractic care, suggesting the associations likely reflected people seeking care for dissection symptoms that had already begun before their stroke occurred.
A commentary from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association, examining the relationship between cervical manipulative therapy and cervical arterial dissection, states that while definitive evidence is lacking for a strong association between neck manipulation and stroke, there is also a lack of evidence proving no association exists. The organization's statement, as described on its professional site, recommends that clinicians warn patients before performing cervical manipulative therapy.
More recent research has pointed toward reassurance for chiropractic patients specifically. A 2026 study using U.S. health-record and claims data from 2010 to 2025, drawn from the TriNetX Linked database and published via link.springer.com, compared 431,492 matched patients who received chiropractor-administered cervical spinal manipulation against an equal number who were prescribed ibuprofen for new neck pain or headache. The study found no evidence of increased cervical artery dissection risk in the chiropractic group compared with the ibuprofen group.
As reported by cleveland.com, that same study tracked 31 new cervical artery dissection diagnoses in the chiropractic group over 30 days of monitoring, compared with 58 in the ibuprofen group — a lower overall rate for the chiropractic cohort, though risk specific to vertebral artery dissection was not significantly different between the two groups. Researchers cautioned that neck pain and headache can themselves be early symptoms of an undiagnosed artery tear, which complicates any effort to separate cause from coincidence in individual cases. They advised clinicians to watch for warning signs such as a sudden or unusual headache, neck pain that differs from a patient's normal pattern, or neurological symptoms.
That tension — between research suggesting no elevated population-level risk and individual cases alleging direct harm — runs through Knotts' case as it heads toward resolution. No independent response from Knotts, her attorneys, Cornett, Maloney or Mt. Lookout Chiropractic beyond what has already been reported was available at this time.
