FriendRob I’m glad you can get relief, especially from self massage. But that really is a mischaracterization of what a well trained massage therapist does. They shouldn’t just try a bunch of stuff and hope one of them works. A few large neck muscles attach around the jaw, another muscle extends as a sheet from the base of the skull to the forehead - there is no reason any thorough physical therapy practioner should miss this entirely. Thoroughness can be a problem though - we’re all human, people start to do their jobs on autopilot sometimes. In fact, when someone comes in for desk work related neck/shoulder pain I “automatically” include some face massage. Pain referal can be a tricky thing, sometimes you have to cast a wide net.
Personally I’d recommend you find a professional with extra training in trigger point therapy and have someone assess your work station and posture. Also, quit scowling at your computer!!
I’ve had good experiences with both my chiropractor and my massage therapist (who happens to be my mom). If you expect a chiropractor to crack your neck a few times and all your physical problems to be solved, you’re wrong. I might be lucky, since my chiropractor is also a personal trainer, so he prescibes stretches to help with my neck and has supervised a few of my lifting techniques and corrected me when I was doing them wrong. I feel so much better than I did before I started seeing him.
Maybe the idea of minor disc misalignments causing “blockages of energy and nutrition” (as he puts it) aren’t entirely correct. But it does make sense to me that your body won’t work at 100% efficiency if everything’s not in the right place.
This is, of course, all anecdotal, IANAD, and YMMV.
Do you have a reputable cite that says subluxations exist? I’ve asked many radiologists about subluxations and not one of them has seen one on any type of radiologic exam. Sure, they’ve seen joints that are partially dislocated, but not the type of supposed slight dislocation that many chiropractors call spinal subluxations that we’re all supposed to have at birth and on.
Unfortunately I’m what some people might call a professional patient. I’ve been in and out of different “physical therapy programs” during the course of my current injury, which has been going on for about three and a half years.
Most of my experience is with physical therapists and each subscribe to different philosophies. My current therapy is between a regular therapist (Mckenzie?) and a Chiropractor. I avoid the latter because the only thing he teaches is that I should be dependent upon him.
The therapists (with varying degrees) always try to teach you proper posture and body mechanics. The best one I’ve had so far was one that mixed water therapy with land therapy. It involved stretching, muscle building/compensating and lifting techniques.
Unfortunately, the insurance company didn’t like the bill so that didn’t last as long as I’d have liked it to.
Do you have one that says they don’t? Seriously, right now we’re matching anecdotal evidence with anecdotal evidence at this point. Also, I’m search engine impaired. If I typed “scientific evidence for spinal subluxations” into my search box, I’d probably get ten thousand hits from websites that wanted to sell me a blender or something.
Can I throw some more anecdotal evidence at you? I have this, well, kink right at my eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebrae, and another one between my fourth and fifth lumbars. The thoracic is more of a nuisance than anything mostly it just Feels. Like. It. Needs. To. Be. Cracked. The lumbar can be extremely paiful at times. I’ve had X-rays taken of my back taken, during periods of time when I was in excruciating pain, and when everything from L5 on down just felt like it was a fraction of an inch off from where it was supposed to be, which the radiologist said showed nothing wrong. Once or twice, a chiropractor has managed to put the thoracic to rights, but since I have terrible posture, it usually goes back out of whack within a few weeks. The lumbar one is another story. Chiropractors have had a fairly easy time adjusting it, but here’s the kicker.
There have been a couple of different times that that spot in my lumbar spine has been excruciatingly painful, and I could almost feel my sacrum grinding against my iliac bones at the sacroiliac joint. Then, once after biting the bullet and doing some intense bellydancing, another time I had simply gotten very drunk and got my muscles to actually relax for a change, I turned over in bed, heard a loud “pop”, like the sound of knuckles cracking through a Marshall bass stack, felt something in my lower spine freaking move and the pain just simply went away.
Really, that’s all the evidence this Mango needs for the existence of subluxations.
Umm, you know that’s not how this works, right? If you want to claim that subluxations exist, then we need to see some evidence that they do- unless you want to claim that subluxations are just a fancy word for placebo, in which case I’ll concede the point.
Seriously, I’ve long been suspicious of chiropractors, and would love to see info that they are not all frauds using ‘the mystique of the medical’ to get people to buy their snake-oil.
Where you run into trouble is where you expand on the basic “pinched spinal nerve” concept to include some kind of mysterious “non-alignment” of the rest of the spine–vertebrae, muscles, nerves, etc.–that is purportedly causing the pinched spinal nerve. And then you go on to blame this mysterious “non-alignment” of your spine for diseases, ailments, and conditions that can have nothing to do with the spine.
Well, I’ve mentioned in other threads my wife’s experience, but I’ll share it again. My wife worked at a bank, and was being chatted up by a customer who was a chiropractor. Somehow, she mentioned that our son has diabetes (he must have been about 4 or 5 at the time) and we were still fairly new to the experience of being parents of a little boy with Type I diabetes.
This [I can’t think of any words foul enough to describe my loathing for him] person suggested that we bring our son in to him, because chiropractic treatment can be used to treat diabetes. I had my wife ask this loser for any evidence when they next met, and he provided a lame ass pamphlet that referenced a study that turned out to be a single case study from the 70’s.
Yeah, you don’t want to tar the whole profession, but sheesh…
Thank you for clarifying. This is what I meant- not that the phenomenon doesn’t exist as an acute condition, but rather was somehow mystically connected to other, unrelated, ailments. Burden of proof and all that.
In having observed my co-worker and her chiropractic experience, it seems to me that the allure of the chiropractor is that he won’t ‘preach’ to you. Unlike a doctor, who will undoubtedly tell you to cut down on x activity, or stop wearing x shoes, the chiro will lay you down, do his thing, and send you on your way. There’s no attempt to fix underlying issues, just temporarily treat symptoms of back pain. of course, that guarantees that you’ll be back. that’s at it best, without any of the ‘pain in your back is causing your bedwetting’ stuff.
Actually, if you were to run your finger down my spine, you would actually be able to feel the misalignment of my 11th and 12th thoracic vertebrae. It’s actually out of whack that a layman with reasonably sensitive hands can find it.
Acute subluxations can and do occur. I just have to agree with those who get off the boat when certain chiropractors claim that they are the cause of all disease.
BTW, I have never met a chiropractor who subscribed to this theory. The ones I have dealt with deal strictly with musculoskeletal problems, and they have all prescribed exercise, stretching, concentrating on maintaining good posture, etc.
I keep hearing about chiropractors who claim that we are all born with assorted subluxations and that this is what causes problems ranging from the aforementioned bedwetting to the aforementioned diabetes.
Oh, and Stonebow ,
Do you see any contradiction between your statements to me and to DDG? On one hand, you admit that subluxations do exist and on the other, you demand and admittedly search-engine impaired person provide evidence for something you already believe exists. Apparently my own personal physical experience doesn’t qualify in your book as evidence, but I’ll save my rant on the rejection of anectodal evidence as denial of the reality of someone’s personal experience for another time.
Also, the mainstream medical community does seem to be very accepting of chiropractic as a treatment for musculoskeletal problems, especially of the spinal variety. I base this assertation on the fact that I have had more than one M.D. suggest that I see a chiropractor for my back problems
Yes Mango, it is anecdotal evidence. As is everything you’re posting.
“Actually, if you were to run your finger down my spine, you would actually be able to feel the misalignment of my 11th and 12th thoracic vertebrae.”
“Acute subluxations can and do occur.”
“Also, the mainstream medical community does seem to be very accepting of chiropractic as a treatment for musculoskeletal problems, especially of the spinal variety.”
No one’s spine is perfectly straight and each individual vertabra does not have a left side that is a mirror image of the right. This is not being misaligned. No amount of “adjustments” are going to change what your spine looks like or feels like to a layman with reasonably sensitive hands. You brought up twice already in this thread that subluxations exist and your anecdotal evidence is even weak as far as anecdotal evidence goes. Don’t you think that maybe there can be other reasons you feel better after a visit to a chiropractor, other than that subluxations are being aligned? I have lower back pain and it feels great after a blowjob. More than one M.D. recommending to you to see a chiropractor is also pretty weak evidence that the mainstream medical community is accepting of chiropractors. I have been in the medical field for fifteen years and have never once heard an M.D. reccomend a chiropractor, therefore, my anecdotal evidence trumps yours. Since you are search engine impared, click on the links that Ca3799 provided.
OK, so my own personal life experience is invalid. The kink in my back that normally is simply annoying but on occasion quite painful is simply a normal variation in spinal anatomy.
I don’t have time to do a thorough check of QuackWatch, but from what I saw on cursory examination, I didn’t see any actual scientific peer-reviewed studies that refute the existence of subluxations. Which basically means that they have a double standard. They demand scientific studies for the effectiveness of the modalities they debunk, but don’t provide the same kind of studies they demand to refute it.
I’ve seen on prior trips to the site stuff like “We sent a guy to three different practitioners, and got three different diagnoses.”
Gee, just like “mainstream” medicine. Seems to me that with any modality they research, they look only at the fringe elements, present them as the mainstream view of practitioners of that modality, and debunk the whacko fringe as a means of dismissing the entire modality, without examining whether the modality is actually more effective than the placebo effect.
If I have time later (I have a job interview in a couple of hours), I’ll do a more thorough look at QuackWatch’s chiropractic section.
Chirobase seemed a lot better. At least they are willing to admit that spinal manipulations can be effective treatments for certain conditions (tension headaches, low back pain). My question is, if the chiropractor isn’t correcting a misalignment (subluxation), just what the hell are they doing, and why does it work?
No, just not enough of a sample for the purposes of this discussion. We can’t base anything on your personal life experience with regards to the effectiveness of this treatment.
Possibly. Or a genetic or congenital disorder. Or, this misalignment might have to do with your lifestyle, shoe choices, etc. It doesn’t make you a bad person, though.
Once again, you don’t understand how science works. You can feel free to call something a subluxation (I don’t know that it’s any more handy than calling it a pinched spinal nerve, but whatever). it’s when you start to claim that subluxations are the root cause for non-spinal afflictions, and yet offer no reason why this might be so, and drape your findings in quasi-mystical talk. The burden of proof is on you to prove this this is a viable treatment (with predictable, consistent results), not mine to dis-prove.
Placebo is the likely answer. However, don’t rule out the fact that massages feel good, so they might work as a short-term fix (endorphins masking pain signals).
Chiropractors are on the gravy train in this state if they can latch onto a Worker’s Compensation claim. We had an employee who has cost almost $50,000 in chiropractic “treatment” for a lower back injury that MDs say isn’t real. But the BWC keeps forking over the cash.
I don’t know what is causing your pain, so I can’t say. I said that it is normal is that spines are not pefectly straight and individual vertabras are not perfectly shaped.
You read this quote by Stonebow, right?:
“Umm, you know that’s not how this works, right? If you want to claim that subluxations exist, then we need to see some evidence that they do- unless you want to claim that subluxations are just a fancy word for placebo, in which case I’ll concede the point.”
You’ve been a member of this board for a long time now, so I’m sure you’ve heard before,“the burden of proof is upon the person who makes the claim”.
What do you mean it “works”? X-rays do not show that anything has been aligned after a chiropractic “adjustment”. If you’re asking why do you feel better, I don’t understand why you’re convinced that feeling better is some sort of evidence of subluxations.
I feel two different ways about chiropractic care.
On one hand I believe whole heartedly in chiropractic care. Subluxations are very real but can’t be fixed quickly by chiropractors because most chiropractors don’t treat the problem! But I think most chiropractors either don’t understand the treatment or don’t bother with good treatment because thier patients will take forever to heal. The subluxation is a symptom… cause either by muscle strain, bad habits, bad posture or any number of other things. Chiropractic care is not a stand alone treatment… and although it started out that way That is why you see massage therapists in chiropractic offices these days. It’s the way it should be… because getting soft tissue work and chiropractic adjustments will actually make the adjustments stay! Otherwise an hour after you get your adjustment your vertebrae goes right back to where it was.
I’m a massage therapist and also think massage therapy alone will NOT cure chronic pain. That is why there are so many modalities in the massage industry, Because one single thing will not cure you (not in the long run anyway).
Ok 2 last things before I rush off to be late to school:
Palmer, the guy who invented chiropractic, used to teach the palmer technique (what your recieve when you get adjusted today) in a weekend seminar.
Lastly… if you have any qualms about the quakery of chiropractic… look up orthobionics. Another interesting field that came about from chiropractic.
Except that I have stated now in two separate posts that I think that this idea is a lot of hooey, so you are demanding repeatedly that I back claims that I did not make.
Now, as for “subluxations not existing”, if you’re talking about these mystical things that we are all supposedly born with that are the root of all disease, I must again wonder why you are asking me to back claims that I have stated that I don’t believe in.
If you are stating that injury or some other factors cannot cause vertebrae to become misaligned, I simply have to say, “huh?”. Also, I have to go back to personal experience when I actually felt the junction between my fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae actually pop out, then pop back in again when I did some twisting stretches.
Something moved, that’s all I know right now.
I’m going to be extremely busy for the next few days, so I’m not going to have the time to do the research I need to in order to back the claim that subluxations can be the cause of musculoskeletal pain, but I plan to be checking back when I have the time to see how this thread is going.
