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
Chiropractors don’t fix anything. They may make things slightly more bearable for a little while, but that’s it.
I found this out the hard way.
Will never use one again.
you know that satisfying feeling that you get when you crack your knuckles? chiropractors are selling you that but for your body. there is no scientific or medical proof behind the legitimacy of chiropractic procedures.
Others have covered the reasons why in this thread, but I think an underrated reason is the term ‘chiropractor’ itself.
Not only does it sound suitably scientific, but it also sounds really great coming off the tongue, with all those hard consonants.
This sounds like a small thing, but this is a profession entirely based on clever marketing and lobbying. Details matter, and so the fact the potential patients can associate the word hard, intelligent science, even though it’s anything but, makes a difference.
1) The origin of chiropractic is very much junk medicine. The idea that you can cure disease by ‘adjusting’ the spine and so on…
2) The present-day practice has been split between two groups – the ‘straights’ who follow the 1800s scam-science, and others who don’t ascribe to that viewpoint (eg, won’t claim they can cure your cold by adjusting your back) more or less become massage-therapists who call themselves ‘Dr’.
3) People perceive benefits for back-pain and soft-tissue injuries from the 2nd group, and thus demand their insurance cover it.
In Denmark it’s a 4 year university degree. You study anatomy, biochemistry, molecular biology, physics and physiology.
Junk medicine because it isn’t really backed by science. On top of that a bad chiropractor can actually make your problem(s) worse.
In addition most of the stuff a chiropractor is going to do to you would be considered a “band-aid solution”. It might make your bad back feel a little better for a few days, but it won’t permanently fix your poor posture or realign your spine.
Not real medicine, potentially dangerous, and doesn’t actually fix most problems.
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.
They don’t stay in their lane sometimes. Years ago, a neighbor visited a chiropractor and bought a coupon book for multiple visits. Later she was diagnosed by her MD as diabetic. The chiropractor warned her about insulin, and put her on an orange juice diet. They carried her body out of her home a month later.
I was having numbness and burning in my thigh and doctors could find nothing wrong. I went to a chiropractor and x rays clearly showed my spine was not straight and curved towards my right shoulder and my pelvis was twisted. After visiting him and doing stretches the numbness is gone so I don’t think it’s junk science
From my personal experience, it is not junk medicine. It has relieved me of serious pain on a couple of occasions. People give it a bad reputation when the front desk gets pushy and wants you to schedule twice a week for a couple months. My body benefited from one a week for 3-4 sessions and I was good, didn’t need to go back… until I twisted my back again years later
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