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
This is a tangentially related anecdote, but an amusing and instructive one:
I had a friend who worked at a Worker’s Compensation type organization. She was in the actuarial department that among other duties, decided which treatments were covered. She was on a project to review coverage for accupuncture treatment for pain management.
**Their scientific finding:** accupuncture has no evidentiary basis and does not outperform placebo treatments.
**Their determination:** for those people who chose it, it was equally effective at lower cost and with fewer side effects relative to the alternatives.
**Their decision:** accupuncture treatment for pain management to be funded at 100%.
1. Why people go to them: Provides temporary relief as a means of stretching. It’s why stretching feels good. It helps increase your range and makes you feel good as a result. I have friends who are physios (or physical therapists as called in the US), who’ve said chiropractic services are on the rise because people don’t like to do their homework that physical therapists provide them. You don’t get better long term by someone giving you an adjustment. You get better long term by doing the strengthening exercises provided to you to physical therapists. According to my physical therapist friends, the main reason people don’t get better is they just get treatment from a chiro/physio, and don’t do the provided workouts at home.
2. Why covered by insurance: Insurance companies are there to make money. If there is enough demand for it, and opportunity for insurance companies to profit from it, no reason why they wouldn’t provide it as a service.
This is a very American-centric question to ask. Short answer is the American Medical Association has run a decades long smear campaign against chiropractors.
While chiropractors in the Palmerists tradition are effectively quacks, there are many more practitioners that take a science based approach and receive far more training in musculoskeletal and nervous system anatomy than medical doctors.
Reddit also seems to be full of shills that jump on every chiropractor related post to rant about the horrors of chiropractors.
The number of comments spouting some anecdote about chiropractors is absurd.
So many people go because chiropractors successfully lobbied for it to be treated seriously. It’s covered by insurance because in many states chiropractors have to get a lot of the same training that physical therapists do. Physical therapists just stick to the evidence whereas chiropractors then go on their weird mystical bullshit.
There’s two main types of chiros. Those that do adjustments and sell snake oil, and those who operate more as physiotherapists. The latter are phenomenal. The look at soft tissue issues, develop a corrective exercise treatment plan, and actually produce results
Back pain is very difficult to treat medically, and it’s hugely disruptive to the lives of people who suffer from it. Mix those two ingredients together, and you get a situation where people are the most vulnerable to charlatans and quacks. It’s the same reason that people were buying Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in the scariest part of covid.
Chiropractic is just the most successful example of junk medicine, at least in the West. It’s part of the culture now, and enjoys a weird, privileged status alongside actual real medicine. People in America will defend it the same way that Chinese people defend acupuncture.
It is a total scam, based on ghost seances and con men. But they got smart and hired lobbyists. That got them a senator in power that added a rider to some bill requiring chiro be covered by insurance than all of a sudden they expanded “schools” across the country and are now the leading mlm scam in the world.
Insurance benefits aren’t about science, it’s about cost vs customer satisfaction. Many of the problems Chiros say they treat are chronic conditions that may or may not respond even to real treatment.
A chiropractor is really cheap compared to a physical therapist or doctor. A good PT will want to see you 2-3 times a week at like $100 a pop for your insurance. A chiro sees you once a week for $50 or so. It’s not guaranteed that either of them can actually make your back stop hurting, even though one of them is far more scientific than the other.
So for your insurance, if seeing a chiro once a week makes you feel better, it’s worth it to cover that to stop you from looking for more expensive treatment.
This isn’t unique to America or private insurance though, in Taiwan they have fully socialized healthcare, some of the cheapest in the world. You would think the government would be the one to cut costs and only pay for real treatment, but they cover TCM like herbal medicine and acupuncture. It’s just what the people want.
You know how anti-vax people complain about “big pharma”? Well, there’s big everything these days, in the form of lobbyists. Homeopathy, acupunture, chiropractice, ayurveda, and many other non-medical, scientifically disproven practices get health benefit coverage because there are associations, earning billions of dollars, lobbying for it.
Half the “Drs” on YouTube who are boasting miraculous ways of improving your health are actually chiropractors, which is appalling. The real MDs have a note on their videos stating they are real MDs, and they don’t sell miracles – because, as actual medical doctors, they can’t publicly state untruths without suffering consequences from the medical orders. Chiropractors can say whatever they want because they don’t even need a licence to practice.
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