Full points for confidence

I went to doctor school, one of the best in the country it was in!

Not the medical kind...

What are chiropractors doing?

Placebo stuff? (e.g. nothing besides leaving an impression they helped)

Dangerous stuff that can work but could paralyze?

Naturopathy, physical therapy, sports medicine, massage therapy.

Those are all the aspects of good chiropractors who see it as a part of a framework of nervous system health. Introducing movement into siezed up or healed injury areas.

Then there's the chiropractors thay do the weekly backsnap for every patient and, well, fuck them. They remove any value there could ever be in chiropractic.

And yet the chiropractor is the one who can provide you with immediate relief. If you've ever had a fucked up back or neck and pinched nerves, then you really understand how helpful a chiropractor can be. Are they the solution for everything? Of course not. Do they greatly help people who are in pain? Absolutely. My doctor has never provided me with any actual treatment for my back, just drugs. The chiropractor actually treats the symptoms and the causes, and it's usually immediate and long lasting relief.

Thank you. I've had this conversation with family members way too often. They love their local chiropractor. They always leave feeling so much better, etc. I ask them what he does, what his advice is, and what kinds of questions he asks them, and everything they describe is not chiropractic. It's massage, or nursing, or physician. No wonder you love him: He's practicing medicine.

Still anecdotal and we could point you to all the people who lost their ability to walk due to chiropractors.

A physio or an osteopathic physician could have done the job just as well if not better 🤷

Those doctors sound awful. It's hard to imagine them at least not taking an X-ray if you came in telling them you have acute pain due to an injury, and why tf wouldn't they refer you to PT? Glad you're better

Fyi, you have (had) a decent malpractice suit against the first doctors, if you care to entertain that.

That's a valid testimonial. Chiropractors exist because sometimes they fix people with chronic pain and mobility issues. However many bad ones there are some of them legitimately help people who fall through the cracks of generalized medicine

Yeah I had a chiropractor (the woo woo kind, not the 'have you been in a car accident' kind) who could twist my head and make something crack and then I'd get no migraines for a year or more. So I would go back once every year or two when they came back, and he'd do it again. Nothing else has ever worked like that. $40 a year to prevent migraines?

He was older and is retired and I have not ever been able to trust any other chiropractor to be able to do that.

And one time my mom had shoulder pain and her doctor sent her to a chiropractor and they fixed that.

I don't think it's magic but also don't think it's nothing. Like massage or other physical manipulations it can do some things.

They are predatory but that is not the only reason for them to make you return. What they do is merely stretching of muscles and ligaments releasing spasms and stress in them. These develop due to trauma, both due to injury and also due to one's daily activities. So the stresses and strains return.

These treatments are like Tai chi or yoga, which gently manipulates your body to its entire range of movements.

Chiropractor does violent manipulation thus are prone to injury.

I had a similar situation, couldn't walk anymore, chiro saved me big time.

But any time I bring it up I get downvoted to oblivion and everyone grasps at straws to try to explain it away.

leave america

When someone offers you a panacea that requires 0 effort and is popularly accepted, it's pretty appealing. Especially if you're scientifically illiterate and don't know why it's bullshit.

I heard something similar when mine was a newborn and had the same appalled reaction. Luckily it wasn't in person - I read it in a random thread when looking something up. Might have been on reddit?

It's bullshit.

It was invented in 1895 by a guy who thought health issues were due to nerves not trasmitting enough energy in the body, which could be fixed by his new fangled snake oil medicine.

"A subluxatrd vertebra is the cause of 95 percent of all diseases, the other 5 percent is caused by displaced joints other than those in the vertabral column"

• A real quote from Daniel David Palmer, beekeeper, school teacher, grocery store owner, magnetic healing spiritualist, metaphysicist, and world's first Chiropractor.

Hi I'm an MD. Technically their schooling is not founded on solid science. In reality, most of them provide beneficial services for patients via massage, muscle stimulators, or gentle manipulation. I do not condone the aggressive spine cracking maneuvers of some chiropractors. As with most things in life, it's all very dependent on the individual in the room.

I'm an osteopathic medical student and I will tell you that chiropractic practice is all bullshit. It was invented by a guy who claims he got the information from ghosts, and their education doesn't cover a fraction of what gets covered in nursing school, let alone medical school.

If you're interested in manipulative treatment, look for an osteopathic physician because our training is everything that MDs do plus the osteopathic manipulative medicine that's based on studies of anatomy and clinical trials.

Chiropractors are the ones that paralyze people and kill them by dissecting vertebral arteries. At best, their treatment will do nothing to help and just make crunchy noises, at worst, their techniques can kill you.

Yes. If you want an expensive massage that makes you feel better, go for a tuggy at the local knocking shop.

Depends, some will message you, if you're there for muscle related therapy or some kind of physical therapy they do, that's pretty reasonably effective, but popping your bones is a very temporary kind of relief, and sometimes it can cause major health problems. It's a lot of risk for a half hour of relief a Tylenol might have equally helped with.

I need something clarified by someone who doesn't go to a chiropractor and never has.

Why would somebody who's never been to a chiropractor be the best person to ask whether or not it's bullshit? If this is how you find out if something is true, you're gonna be in for a rude awakening, and probably sooner than later.

Would a journalist whose written for Bellingcat, and been a war correspondent be enough, if so here's a podcast about how Chiropractors came to be a thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8lLVK_1O6s

It's a good podcast called Behind The Bastards.

Also of note is that Chiropractic practice has a yearly death toll... People literally die and become disable by their manipulations each and every year. It's dangerous pseudo science, developed by spiritualist "healers".

I was recently reading a blog post by a generalist doctor (Baptiste Beaulieu). His kid, a baby (so no possible placebo effect, right?), was having trouble sleeping. His companion not being a doctor, wanted to try a baby chiropractor. Needless to say, he was very dubious about the whole thing, but nothing in his medical training was helping.

Twice they went and twice the chiropractor essentially lightly touched the baby here and there and done (no cracking anything!). Yet for months afterwards the baby would sleep soundly.

There are countless such anecdotes, but rarely anything scientifically reproducible. Ie, it's that baby chiropractor who's doing it. And he can't tell what exactly he did, so that BB could reproduce the effect, despite being a trained doctor.

It's as fascinating as it is infuriating for people who've dedicated their lives to studying medecine (amongst them, my father and my wife).

it is and it isn't.

it works for some things for some people, but it has no consistent or replicable results across things and patients, so it isn't scientific.

it's more like mental health therapy. therapy works for some folks in some circumstances with certain therapists... but again it isn't explicable. there is no general set of emotional therapeutic principles that will work for everyone.

and for many folks this type of stuff is a placebo effect. we all know someone who goes to therapy... but it never fixes their problems... but it convinces them that they are 'fixing it'. just like person you know who went gluten free who 'no longer gets headaches'.

compare that to drug where the entire point of a drugs/medical procedures where the entire point is reproducibility. a certain drug is supposed to cure a certain problem for all folks that have that problem.

I experienced an injury and literally couldn’t walk for 3 months. Three doctors kept ignoring my pain and thought I was exaggerating. They kept treating me like a drug-seeker and I couldn’t afford more visits due to be uninsured & now unable to work. They also would not refer me to a physio/physical therapist without more appointments and several expensive tests.

Physical therapists! I swear by physical therapy. I had sciatica for about a year, and after a few weeks of physical therapy, it was 100% gone.

The doctor I went to before that said basically "lose weight and come back in 6 months". My first PT session, the therapist did some deep tissue thing to my lower back and (temporarily) made the pain go away almost completely. She was like "Yeah you have an injured muscle that tenses up weird now, do these exercises at home and it should clear up" and ended up being 100% right.

Probably some combination of doctors and a physical therapist. A good general practitioner should be able to refer you to someone.

Physical therapy is what I use for my neck and back pain. They do massage then work the muscles and give out exercises for me to do at home.

I'm not sure, but I do know that everyone I've ever known to go to a chiropractor for back pain has had poor results. Relief for a few days, then booking their next appointment, rinse and repeat, until eventually they stop wasting money on it.

Chiropracty is the equivalence of some random Joe seeing someone doesnt doesnt have a pulse and pulling the cable out of a lamp to shock them.

Sure it may cause a localized release of endorphins that may make the pain temporarily subside, but like using a defibrillator without knowing the patient's heart rhythm, you'd carry a huge risk of doing more harm than good

Eta: Forgot to add that physical therapy would be the first stop. If there is damage that may need medical intervention, it would be an orthopedist.

If you go to a physical therapist, make sure they actually consider your other health issues (if any).

My recent experience: I tried multiple PTs. One said they were familiar with my issues, but kept trying to make me do things that were painful and then tried to gaslight me by saying I wasn't actually in pain. Another one didn't even ask about my other health issues (which absolutely affect their work), and then proceeded to send like 6 different assistants in to guide me through the exercises. None of them asked me how the exercises were for me and I wasn't even told how long I was supposed to do them for. I finally just booked an appointment with a PT that I already know is good, but I can't get in for a few months and it's a couple hours round trip to go in person. It sucks but at least with them I can trust relatively well that they aren't going to actively harm or gaslight me.

For context he is member of Commission on Pseudoscience