Richard Tyler has questioned whether AIDS might be a creation of the medical industry.

The chairman of the Board of Chiropractic Examiners describes how he once halted an asthma attack by popping the victim's back and stopped a woman's epileptic seizures with homeopathic remedies.

He openly espouses chiropractic techniques and claims that have been grounds for discipline for other practitioners.

A one-time child actor who spent the 1960s at the center of the California bodybuilding scene, where he became friends with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tyler, 75, has never been one to temper his rhetoric. For years, he wrote a fiery column for an industry publication called Dynamic Chiropractic.

Tyler's book, "Alternative Chiropractic," offers a full account of his approach to the profession he is in charge of regulating – and shows dramatically how these notions test the limits of what California has previously allowed chiropractors to do.

Tyler sees chiropractors as full-service healers, not just the ones to see when your back is acting up. In "Alternative Chiropractic," he describes treating patients with heart conditions, cancer and more.

Tyler recounts the story of a woman who showed up at a Sacramento clinic where he had just started working, her feet black and reeking from gangrene.

As Tyler tells it in the book, he wanted to send the woman right back to the hospital so she didn't die in their waiting room. But the clinic director smiled, according to Tyler, and said, "You've got a lot to learn."

"To my surprise, with a combination of intravenous chelation, chiropractic adjustments, nutrition, physiotherapy and homeopathic remedies, she not only survived but thrived," Tyler writes.

In his later work at the clinic, Tyler reports, "I found myself working on everything from cancer to multiple sclerosis."

Tyler even dedicated a chapter of his book to sexual counseling, including his views on the pressure that men feel to perform in bed.

"All a woman needs to do is to lie down, receive and pass judgment," he writes. "Her 'womanhood' isn't on the line."

Tyler writes about being militantly opposed to what he characterizes as the medical juggernaut and its dependence on drugs and invasive surgery.

Even when Tyler suffered an apparent stroke in his office one day, he refused to see a medical doctor, he recalls, and received spinal manipulation every few hours for the next two days.

"With nothing but adjustments, I was able to reclaim my health," he writes. "No drugs or allopathic nostrums (mainstream medical drugs) could have done what the skilled hands of my colleagues were able to accomplish."

Tyler traces some of his bitterness toward the medical profession to his adult daughter's death from cancer. An oncologist persuaded her to take an experimental drug, he writes, and she was in and out of hospitals until she died a few months later.

"It is my firm belief that she would probably be alive today if she'd been left alone," he writes. "To the medical profession, however, she was little more than a lab rat."

Tyler is what's known in chiropractic circles as a "mixer" – he embraces treatments beyond strict spinal manipulation. In his book, he says he delights in using alternative therapies, including one that has been labeled as "unproven" and "strange" by Consumer Reports.

He dedicates a section to iridology: diagnosing disease through the iris. Elsewhere, he describes his use of "nutritional reflex testing." He decides what nutrient to recommend by testing whether muscles that feel weak to the touch strengthen when a patient holds the nutrients in his or her hand. He recommends a heart device called an Endocardiograph, whose manufacture was banned by the Food and Drug Administration in 1963.

"They are still around – old maybe – but can be found," he writes.

Tyler's expansive view of his profession puts him well into the areas that previous iterations of the board, as well as California laws and regulations, have disallowed. And that position may prove awkward as he reviews cases like that of Christine Anderson, scheduled to come up early next year.

The Los Angeles chiropractor faces discipline, up to license revocation, for advertising techniques beyond the scope of practice for the profession.

Anderson, who declined to comment on the case, claimed that homeopathy was the best way to deal with ear infections in children, according to the board. She bad-mouthed the safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccines, claimed that chiropractic treatment of pregnant women could shorten labor and recommended spinal adjustment of infants.

Among her techniques that the board accusation says went beyond the legal scope of chiropractic practice were homeopathic remedies, flower remedies and fertility counseling.

In "Alternative Chiropractic," Tyler endorses comparable techniques and makes similar claims.

For vaccines, he stops short of recommending chiropractic treatment as an alternative, which is specifically forbidden by a state regulation.

But he argues that dangers of vaccines "far outweigh their value as promulgated by the pharmaceutical industry and their slaves in the medical profession." Homeopathic remedies work better, he writes, "than to squirt bacteria from the flesh of some diseased and rotting animal into your body."