A Small Investigation into the Legitimacy of the Chiropractic Field.

Hello there,

I’m sure many of you can relate to having either a physically intensive job, a pastime involving sitting, or poor posture. Well, I have all three of these and, as such, I started experiencing minor back-pain. My roommate happened to have had a slipped disk and found chiropractors to be extremely helpful for his condition so he recommended I see one.

I took him up on the recommendation and began seeing a local practitioner. Personally, I found that after a few visits I felt marginally better the next day. More significant to me was the tailored stretching plan given to me by the chiropractor—which I found yielded lasting progress.

The relative success of my experience coupled with my enthusiasm for the intensity of the practice (aggressively cracking one’s spine into alignment is badass) led me to recommend seeing a chiropractor when a friend mentioned back pain. Much to my surprise, she responded with a smug: “I don’t believe in chiropractors…”

This absolutely shocked me, having never considered chiropractors or their practice to be a matter of belief. This response came directly out of side-field into the confines of my naïve understanding of the world. When I asked why, she responded with a lack lustre: “I dunno.”

This sparked my interest to see if I had been shammed. So, I began doing some research on the issue. To begin I consulted news articles, just to get a feel for public perceptions on the subject. An array of articles with daunting titles filled my screen, warning not to be fooled by chiropractors’ dubious claims.

Having only thought of chiropractic treatment as treatments for issues involving the back and neck I was quite surprised to see the amount of ailments chiropractors apparently claim to be able to treat through spine alignment.

This was both the beginning of when things got interesting, and when I decided to see what I could dig up on the topic in academic journals. I found a study conducted by Shelley et al. (2015) concerning what chiropractors claim to treat on their websites. They used 80 Canadian clinic websites and 11 association websites as their samples.

Their findings were astonishing to me. Here’s some of what they said…

“Interestingly, many clinics suggested that chiropractic care was able to address concerns such as ADHD/attention deficit disorder (ADD) (37.5%), allergies (37.5%), bedwetting (30%) and premenstrual syndrome (PMS) (32.5%). (p 16)

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Clearly there are quite a few chiropractors claiming to treat conditions beyond what research supports.* (*No credible sources were found to support non-musculoskeletal condition treatment by chiropractors)
But is there evidence for the primary issues that come to mind when we think of chiropractors? I decided to research back and neck pain in order to best answer the question.

Back Pain

I found an article by Richard A. Deyo in the Journal of the American Medical Association that reviews previous studies on chiropractic efficacy on back pain. The consensus was that it was effective, relatively more so than most similar treatments. Studies comparing it to physical therapy found chiropractic care to be more effective with similar cost/time commitment.

Neck Pain

A randomized study conducted by UCLA researchers in 2002 which was published the American Journal of Public Health found that chiropractic treatments were effective in treating neck pain, with varying (but still positive) degrees of efficacy and risk depending on the exact methods they used.

Conclusion

At the end of all of my scrounging the internet it seems as though, as always, there is a bit of truth on both sides here. On the one hand- there are absolutely some sketchy claims made by chiropractors out there that appear not to be supported by the facts. From my brief research, it looks as though this is mostly for non-physical issues. For issues concerning back and neck pain, it appears as though there is strong evidence that it is an effective form of treatment.

Sources:

Wenban, A. B. (2003). Is chiropractic evidence based? A pilot study. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 26(1), 47-47.

Deyo, R. (2017). The Role of Spinal Manipulation in the Treatment of Low Back Pain. JAMA, 317(14), 1418-1419.
Shelley, J., Clark, M., & Caulfield, T. (2015). The face of chiropractic: Evidence‐based? Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies, 20(1), 13-22.

Hurwitz, Eric L., Morgenstern, Hal, Harber, Philip, Kominski, Gerald F., Yu, Fei, & Adams, Alan H. (2002). A randomized trial of chiropractic manipulation and mobilization for patients with neck pain: Clinical outcomes from the UCLA neck-pain study.(Abstract). The American Journal of Public Health, 92(10), 1634-41.