Simple question really, but I am woefully ignorant on Chiropractic and the chiropractors who administer treatments.
Are they on the same level as psychics, homeopathy, Mayan end-of-the-world predictions and so on?
Perhaps the practice is just mostly or somewhat woo… kind of like acupuncture (IE, legitimate research has been mixed, some insurance companies accept it as a valid medical treatment)?
Or is it really legitimate, to be as respected as dentistry and medicine?
The fundamental teachings of chiropractic, as developed by DD Palmer, are woo. It’s basically vitalism - that there’s some life energy that Palmer called innate intelligence that is the natural healing force in the body, and that it gets disrupted by misalignments of the spine. The idea is that once this life energy is restored to balance, it can fix all sorts of health ailments, including things that have nothing to do with your spine at all, like asthma. It is entirely woo.
However, it would appear that over the years playing around with the body, chiropractors may have learned some actual stuff about the human body, and some of their techniques can indeed provide some relief from back pain and such, but it has nothing to do with subluxations and blocking the magical healing life force, but simply manipulating a problem body part.
Chiropractors range from “straight” chiropractors follow the psuedoscientific vitalism nonsense very closely. More scientifically minded chiropractors actually essentially try to act like doctors or physical therapists that specialize in the back.
Are the latter legitimate medical practitioners? I don’t really know. I wouldn’t want to go to one. But it’s clear that the first group isn’t.
I’d imagine you could give a basic test to a chiropractor to ask if they believe in innate intelligence - if so, they’re a kook. If not… well, I still would rather just see doctors, but maybe they’re not kooks.
For instance, their specialty is lower back pain, and there the results are inconclusive:
Some other option, namely: How the heck should I know?
I went to a chiropractor for a few years. I never could make up my mind whether it really helped or had no effect whatsoever. And there were times when I think it made the symptoms worse. I probably wouldn’t go to one again.
I voted “some other option” I think there are some who are valid chiropractic practitioners and there are far more who are selling a bunch of woo crap.
My personal experiences:
A horse, deemed dangerous and in physical pain. When he came to me he’d been “diagnosed” by several prominent vets, including specialists at Cornell University. The best they could come up with was atypical kissing spine. I had him treated by a certified Chiro (means they have to be either a DVM or a 4yr certified farrier prior to certification as a Chiro for animals)… at the time of his treatment, his spine problem had existed for approx 2 years and had affected his movement enough to effect the way his hooves grew out (because of the way he transferred his weight). After the first treatment, he showed immediate relief in the sense that he no longer reared or acted agitated when he thought he was going to be tacked up. This change was within 24 hours of the treatment and there was no other training to account for the fact that he’d quit rearing. Two treatments later, he was under tack as a dressage horse and scoring fairly well for his training level and showing no signs of pain.
My personal experience: I was taking dressage lessons and the instructor continually told me that my head was tilted to the left. Three months, she ‘nagged’ me to sit up ‘straight’ and try as I might, I could not detect that my head was tilted left (except for the weight shift was affecting the horse). I ended up taking a ‘free chiro’ treatment that was offered as an business introduction. It caused me all sorts of body tingling over the next two days and that was all that I personally noticed until my next lesson. My instructor was nearly leaping for joy when I was finally sitting up straight (and the horse finally got a break from me hanging over its left shoulder). (I had been T-Boned in an accident about 10 years prior and my head tilt was likely started by muscle guarding after the accident).
So, I do think they physical aspect of Chiropractic has some merit to it. Especially since the horse who benefited could not have had any form or placebo effect (since he had no idea that the guy poking him was a magic Chiropractor) and the horses change in weighting his feet was reflected in the way his hooves grew out.
I don’t think anything of any ‘body energy’ woo and would avoid anyone who pushes those things (along with the blood tests, eye tests, ect).
Originally all woo. Now only mostly woo. If you throw enough shit against a wall, eventually some of it will stick.
My mother goes to the chiropractor every week. She swears she feels relief. That’s good enough for me. I have been to his office (waiting for her) and seen the woo he pushes. She does not partake of any of his other “services”. She acknowledges that they are crap. But she gets in so much pain in her back, that even if his manipulations are purely placebo effect, that’s fine. Relief is relief. And her insurance covers most of it, so win/win.
Well said. This should have been an option.
I tend to think that any non-woo benefit that one could get from a chiropractor, one could also get from a physical therapist.
Yes, and a physical therapist will treat you for a specified period of time and often give you home exercises or advice about how to move/work/exercise so that the pain does not return. A chiropractor generally wants to see you regularly forever.
Pretty much what he said.
If a chiropractor claims to be able to cure diabetes or asthma or something like that with chiropracty, then I would say that that particular person is either mistaken or is deliberately going after the woo crowd. However, the ones who stick to trying to alleviate back pain apparently have some success, though of course there’s always the placebo effect. I think that the success rate of these chiropractors is greater than the placebo effect can account for.
I go to a masseuse, and he can relieve pain in my back for a while, and also loosen up joints, as well as help move fluid in order to help with my congestive heart failure/lymphedema. So IME manipulation of the body can at least help you feel better for a time.
This.
The non-woo benefit is small, temporary, and makes little to no difference to health in the long run.
QtM, who once shared an office with a chiropractor who rejected the principles of chiropractic and focused on delivering therapy for complaints of the back, shoulders, and hips.
I saw a chiropractor semi-regularly for years, twice a week at my worst and eventually at my own discretion. He was very good. I asked him about things like curing allergies or helping people to stop smoking, and he told me that was all nonsense, that chiropractic treatments were all about bio-mechanics. Good on him. If he’d said anything else I would have called him a fraud and walked out. Eventually he told me that there was no more he could do, the remaining problems were soft-tissue related and recommended I see a physiotherapist of his recommendation (in the U of C’s kiniseology and sports medicine clinic, so I expect high standards applied), who ended up telling me a lot of the same things my chiropractor did.
Maybe I could have skipped the chiropractic treatments and gone right to physio, I don’t know, but I never got the impression my chiropractor was a charlatan. And more than once I walked into his office bent over double and walked out sore, but upright. His office was full of anatomy textbooks and models of joints and spines, there was never any mention of energy points or chi or anything like that.
And I really hate the term “woo”. It’s infantile. “New-age garbage” is much more appropriate. And I know that some chiropractors do peddle new age garbage, but mine wasn’t one of them.
In the UK, they’re available on the NHS for back treatment- I wouldn’t have paid to see one, but I was referred to one free by my doctor. All his claims did refer to actual body parts and mechanisms rather than ‘energy’ or obvious bullshit, and the actual manipulations certainly helped relax my muscles, which had been a cause of a lot of pain, but it later became very obvious that his ‘diagnosis’ of the problem was a complete pile of poo. Whether it even made medical sense, I’m not sure, and I can’t remember enough detail to check.
He did, however, correctly realise there was something else going on when it no longer appeared to be simple back pain, at which point he abruptly stopped treatment and said I needed to be referred to a specialist, and probably needed an MRI because he could damage something as his initial diagnosis was obviously wrong.
Are we all four years old? Can we use grown-up words please? We have a perfectly fine term in “pseudoscience” and do not need to revert to baby talk like “woo.”
Thanks for understanding.
I voted “somewhat”. My chiro treats only my back and I have had no back problems since I started seeing him. I used to come up regularly with backaches. However, he has searched all over for a chiro to treat him and not found one that satisfied him. It would be an exaggeration that he complained that they were all quacks but he was not happy with any of them. My wife’s stepfather, a practicing chiro did say that they were mostly all quacks.
Just for the record, let me say that I have no objection to “woo”. It expresses something quite clearly, all that I demand of a word.
I’ve been to chiropracters twice for upper back problems. The MDs admit they have nothing but drugs to give me. The problems are unclear but probably just fibrous tissue getting stuck on mine spine somewhere. Perhap physical therapists have an answer as well. The first time I went to a chiropracter I was quite skeptical, but after explaining the problem, the guy looked at my back, and without any specific prompting stuck his finger on my back and said “Does it hurt right here?”. He was right on target. Further research on the subject told me that chiropracters are very good at relieving back pain like this.
The only reason I went to see that guy is that I had been impressed by something that happened earlier. The wife of a friend had fallen and injured her wrist. She insisted on seeing a chiropracter and had gone to see him. He told her to go to a hospital and get Xrays, and then see an MD for treatment. So I knew he wasn’t totally wrapped up in the pseudo-science.
My opinion on the matter is that chiropracters have an excellent knowledge of muscles and the skeleton, especially in the back where problems are common, and through manipulation are good at relieving pain. Other than that, chiropractic medical philosophy is utter nonsense.
Humm, well I didn’t actually know about the new-age trippy bullshit that were the foundations of chiropractic or I would have voted differently.
I recently have been seeing a chiropractor and I’ve been happy with the out comes - my hips we quite jacked up from a c-section gone wrong and after a few treatments it feels much better.
FWIW, the lady I see has her office set up like a physiotherapists office and stresses mechanics - she’s never said anything I would consider nutty or totally out there.
So I guess I would change my poll response from ‘Not Woo.’ to ‘Depends who you get.’
Very interesting responses, and I’ve learned a lot so far! Thanks for sharing everyone.
Also, to those who don’t like the word woo… in the politest way possible to you I say: suck it. 