this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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I need something clarified by someone who doesn't go to a chiropractor and never has.
I've heard it's all bullshit from multiple sources over the years. I've heard they aren't even doctors most of the time and that there's no empirical evidence that supports chiropractic practitioners at all.
Every attempt to research this is met with thousands of results from low quality sources all singing its praise.
So is it bullshit?
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"
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.
As in, "if it's a chiropractor in the room, you're rolling dice with your spine and your wallet."
Fuck those charlatans.
Surely the ones who aren't scam artists call themselves masseuses or sports therapists
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.
What is your opinion of Dr. Beau Hightower?
It was very hard to tell whether or not his youtube channel is satire, but given the websites and email address listed, I think this person that appends their name with alphabet soup is probably taking themselves at least somewhat seriously. I have serious concerns about his professionalism just based on the video titles, categories, and thumbnails.
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.
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.
Because of confirmation bias.
If everyone who goes to a chiropractor says it's good but all evidence says otherwise then I need an outside opinion without the confirmation bias.
Being free from confirmation bias doesn't make you an expert, though. Their opinion could be influenced based on something they heard or all kinds of other things that have no bearing on whether or not it's true.
Yeah I worded it wrong initially.
Someone who's gone and didn't say it was good would still be able to give me a better frame of reference.
I’ve gone once due to hip pain. He cracked my back then went through some range of motion stretches with my leg, basically the same shit I did before football practice every day. Go to a doc or physical trainer in sports medicine, chiros are a waste of money and potentially dangerous.
I've been to a chiropractor.
The woman claimed basil essential oil could be used in place of: ibuprofen, hand sanitizer, soap, and a few other things.
That's right, not only was she a chiropractor; she was an essential oil salesperson.
Snake oil. Chiropractors are snake oil salesman, no different from TCM peddlers. I think TCM peddlers are actually, at least in the U.S. where you can't sell water that's had dead animals fermenting in it, better because acupuncture won't permanently damage you. It just gives you that nice placebo.
That would be me. My parents took me to a chiropractor as a kid, but I stopped going in my teens, and now consider it bullshit.
There's a few odd cases of back pain where manipulating the spine can work. Some of this got integrated into mainstream physical therapy. If it stopped there, then there wouldn't be a problem, but chiropractors claim they can heal just about anything by manipulating the spine. Any time you see someone claiming their one weird trick can cure anything from neck pain to the common cold, you should be very, very skeptical. It's on them to prove that, and they have not proved that after more than a century.
I think it was just bad wording
Source I'm dyslexic and didn't notice anything wrong lmao
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).
These are called coincidences. If you take the baby to the chiropractor and the baby suddenly gets well, of course you're going to talk about it! That doesn't mean that the chiropractor had anything to do with it. What's the chiropractor's success/failure ratio?
Also, the idea of a "baby chiropractor" squicks me out. Maybe this one only lightly touched the baby, but I've heard horror stories about them harming babies. People think "Oh, the worst that can happen is that nothing changes." No, the chiropractor can make things worse.
Squicks. This is a new word, but I approve.
my sister has a dog chiropractor. she takes her dog two every other month for $50.
dog was having issues with certain sitting positions and randomly yelping in pain. vet didn't do anything, but the chiropractor does something and the dog no longer has pain and isn't yelping anymore.
it's bullshit, but it's bullshit that works for some people. just like lonely depressed people stop being so once they find god or some other 'purpose' in their lives. and it doesn't work for others.
It's also bullshit that can harm people.
yeah? and? every single medical procedure and drug you take comes with risks as well.
That's why I like to use treatments that are backed up by science. Don't take risks without a good reason.
If it was months it could be that it would've gone away in that time anyway. Our baby had colic for four months and for couple months she did go to baby massage or some other quack doctor (mother's father insisted and paid so what the hell..) and the mother still believes it helped because of that... I'm sure it didn't do shit and it would've gotten better anyway in that time frame.
maybe the baby wasn't getting hugged enough
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.
Could you explain how you don't think mental health therapy is a science? We have psychology as a major in most universities, unlike chiropractic studies which are usually offered in different or specialized institutions. We have doctors of psychiatry that are actual doctors that can prescribe medications, just like general practice doctors. Therapy in different fields, whether it is in individual mental health or couple's therapy are active areas of research in academia with published works you can read up on. So I'm not sure how you're equating Mental health with Chiropractic practice.
It isn't a placebo effect, as you mentioned. Therapy isn't a cure/medication like drugs or a surgery for some diseases, therapy is more akin to exercising your mind so that you can face stress/fears/ any kind of emotional turbulence without losing it. Or as an avenue for personal growth or reducing effects of mental trauma. Saying it's a placebo effect without backing it up could be actively harmful for people who might be considering it and actually need it. Yes, it's not for everyone, and every therapists is different and every patient may or may not be willing to put in the work for it, but that doesn't make it ineffective or a placebo effect. But how is that different from, say, how the covid vaccine affects one person vs the other (some experience more protection and/or suffer from mild symptoms for a couple of days, etc.) or how chemotherapy may work for some patients but not for others?
it's not scientifically reproducible, that's how.
that isn't to say you can learn shit from it. but it's there are simple way too many variables to control. medicine is messy.
Look up Cognitive Behavior Therapy. It's a type of therapy that has some solid science behind it.
First of all, I agree that it would be great if a drug/medicinal procedure would cure a certain condition in each and every patient or at least the vast majority of them. Sadly, that is rarely the case, but that by no means is equivalent to say that when this drug or procedure helps, it's mostly or entirely due to the placebo effect. That's the whole reason we need randomised controlled trials as their might be a significant difference in treatments that only becomes clearly observable once a certain sample size is reached and possible confounding variables are controlled for (usually by randomisation). The human body and many of diseases are incredibly complex so it's naive to assume we could forsee each and every possible influence on a drugs efficacy and therefore determine without error how a patient will react to it.
While there is quite a big group of non-responders when it comes to psychotherapy, it is, on average, an effective treatment clearly proven by a vast body of research. There is still much more to find out, but putting it on the same level as not consuming gluten is in no way defensible.
Now to get back to chiropractics, I don't know too much about it, but I thought it's mostly short term pressure and pain relief, which however rarely combats the underlying issues. Can still be helpful, of course, as pain relief helps with getting more physical activity, as this is often a culprit for example back problems.
That said, I personally wouldn't let anyone touch my spine or neck like some chiropractors do. I'd be too scared of irreparable nerve damage.
Cool, I know several people and a dog or two who use chiropractic services. To them it's like getting an oil change in their car or taking the car in when the brakes squeal for a brake job.
Most folks don't give a fuck how shit works or where it's 'real' or not. They just want the annoying thing to go away and find someone who makes it go away.