I know so many people to go to a chiropractor on a weekly basis and either pay out of pocket or have benefits cover it BUT I seen articles or posts pop up that refer to it as junk junk medicine and on the same level as a holistic practitioner???
In: Biology
Ideally, healthcare is dictated by science, and in many cases it is. Chiropractic practitioners have had a difficult time validating their claims using rigorous scientific methods, so they are deemed junk medicine by those who hold medicine to a high standard.
The broader issue is that humans are, at an individual, pretty bad at rational decision making; i.e., adhering to scientific standards.
Imagine you get a stuffy nose and you believe you have a cold coming on. Someone gives you a little white pill and tells you that this will cure your cold. You take the pill, and your symptoms go away. The pill must have worked!
Well, not so fast. First of all, you may not have had a cold at all. It might have been an allergic reaction to conditions that were only present for a day or two. Conditions improved, and so did your symptoms, but you also took the pill at the same time, so you incorrectly attributed the improvement to the pill.
Another possible explanation is the placebo effect. This is pretty mind blowing by anywhere from 30 to 60% of patients will see symptoms improve when given a plain old sugar pill, provided they believe the pill will help them. There aren’t any complete explanations of the placebo effect, but we believe it has to do with the power of perception (you’ll feel better if you believe you feel better).
There may be other factors that contributed to the resolution of your symptoms as well. Maybe your body just managed to fight off the cold quickly. Maybe you changed something else about your lifestyle or diet that aided.
The scientific process is intended to rule all of these potential “confounding factors” out when evaluating the effectiveness of a remedy. When we control for all thee factors, chiropractic doesn’t appear to have any measurable benefits for most conditions. People still go because they *feel* a benefit though. It could be as simple as placebo.
Chiropractic has been demonstrated to aid in the relief of lower back pain, so most insures that do cover chiropractic treatment will only do so if the patient has a diagnosis consistent with that symptom. Unscrupulous chiropractors simply diagnose and code treatment in ways they know that insurers will pay. Since back pain is patient-reported, and can’t be verified through a body measurement, it’s difficult to nail down this type of fraud.
People do irrational things all the time. For example, some people refuse to fly, even though it is safer than driving. We know that drinking and driving is incredibly dangerous, but people still do that. Smoking increases your risk of cancer, but people still smoke. There’s a very long list of common, irrational behaviors that have nothing to do with medicine. Humans, by and large, just aren’t very good at adhering to rational decision making practices.
Latest Answers